Question

1. What is the focus of Business Analytics. Provide the three main levels and provide an example of their application.
2. Many business are focusing on data harvesting as part of their core competency (Amazon, Facebook, and Google are perfect examples). How could these companies utilize this immense data along with Business Analytics to create and sustain competitive advantage.

Answer 1

1) Business analytics: it is the process of examining large data sets generally termed as big data. Analyzing the correlation, patterns, association, consumer behavior etc from the data helps in organizational decision making. Business analytics helps in identifying trends and patters to forecast future. It is a statistical analysis practice focus on providing actionable recommendation.

Three main levels of business analytics are descriptive analysis, predictive analysis and prescriptive analysis.

Descriptive analysis: it simply describes and summaries raw data in to a human interruptible form. It summaries or describes the data using business intelligence tools for better understanding. Example: sales and revenue report

Predictive analysis: it predicts the possible outcomes using statistical models. It is used to predicting the future by sing the past data available. Example: hotels may analysis booking data to predict peek vacancy periods to staff appropriately.

Prescriptive analysis: it is used to recommend one or more course of action on analyzing the available data. It anticipates what will happen, when will happen and why will happen. Example: oil companies use prescriptive analysis to decide whether to drill or optimize resource extraction and minimize the impact of extraction process.

2) Data harvesting is the process of automatically extracts large amount of data from websites. It helps the companies to identify trends and patterns. Big data is an important method of big companies to outperform. Business analytics helps in analyzing data which helps companies to identify new opportunities. Business analytics helps large companies to convert huge volume of data into smaller amount of information and insights.

Companies like Amazon, Google, facebook etc manage to leverage the vast amount of information they get from their users like search habits, posts they share, products they buy etc into major source of revenue stream. Companies manage to get these data and effectively use this data for marketing and competitive advantage.

As companies collect more transactional data into digital form they get accurate and detailed information. Some companies collect this data to conduct controlled experiments which helps them in decision making. Effective use of these data helps the companies to identify the trends and also to implement new business strategies which bring competitive advantages.

Right information at right time helps companies to achieve competitive advantages. Business analytics helps to analyze available data which helps companies to understand the customer preferences. This helps them to implement new products, marketing methods, strategies etc which helps to gain competitive advantages.