Analytics is always a hot topic in every organization and practitioners in this field. But, do people really see the reason why it is causing such a buzz for the past decades? We are frequently hearing terms like Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning and everyone seems to want to have a piece of the cake in this economy, not mention the different technologies involved from open source technologies like R, Python, Hadoop, Spark, Tensorflow, etc. to propreitary platforms like SAS, IBM, Tableau. But do they really understand why they need these AI/ML and accompanying technologies or maybe just being part of this whole bandwagon?
To put things into proper perspective, let us use Technopedia’s definition of Analytics:
Analytics is the scientific process of discovering and communicating the meaningful patterns which can be found in data.
It is concerned with turning raw data into insight for making better decisions. Analytics relies on the application of statistics, computer programming, and operations research in order to quantify and gain insight to the meanings of data. It is especially useful in areas which record a lot of data or information.
As mentioned in the above definition, Analytics is really the actual scientific process involve making use of the different mathemathical and computing activities to churn own valuable and meaningful insight that would help the organizations achieve their full potential and value. The different technologies are more of enablers to help achieve this outputs and not the other way around. It should be a mix of having the right people to solve the problem and the right solution to help on solving it.
This idea applies to any organization, big or small. The process will always be the same, but choosing the right tool is really important. You don’t necessarily need to spend millions of dollars if the use case you wanted can easily be solved in Excel, right? Understanding your use case and the returned value to your company will allow you to build a great business case for your analytics initiative, and that is already Analytics!
The true value of analytics is being able to anwer a specific problem and making use of this information to create action that will positively affect your business. This is what we will be focusing on the future posts in this site, how we can deliver value to your business by using analytics.