Why Business Analytics for Managers?

Decisions are influenced by gut feelings, though we try to be subjective and provide logical reasons. This process may sometimes result in successful business outcomes and other times may not. Leaders and Managers, who follow their guts and takes the direction of what they feel right, on success will be lauded as visionaries and their success stories inspire generations.

In today’s cut-throat competitive business landscape, even a marginal mistake in decision making can cause significant effect, some even threaten the very survival of the businesses.

As quoted by Edward Deming, revered as the father of quality management.

“In God we trust, rest bring data” – Edward Deming

Data has become the key aspect for any business decisions and the process of data-driven decisions is becoming an important part of organizations’ strategic competitiveness. Business Analytics is the field of enabling businesses to take decisions.

Business analytics plays a key role not only for senior managers for strategic decisions but also for all levels of managers and decision-makers from project managers, team leads, delivery managers, account managers, etc.

Business Analytics skills are perceived as essential for managers of the level.

A recent study by Mckinsey showed that organizations perceive business analytics as an essential skill for managers of all levels. This will enable the organizations to transform into data-driven organizations in a holistic way.

Top seven techniques of Business Analytics for managers:

Business Analytics is categorized into four groups: Descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, Discovery analytics, and prescriptive analytics. The techniques used in Business Analytics are vast and vary widely with the businesses. These are the top seven techniques of Business Analytics used to support data-driven decisions.

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics is the interpretation of business data to get insights into the business. Most commonly used dashboards, reports, summaries, and metrics are a part of descriptive analytics. In that sense, descriptive analytics is the core of business intelligence and is widely used in business.

Visualization

Data visualization is all about presenting data in visualization representation through visualization tools, providing insights for business.
Almost all professional industries including finance, retail, government, medical, service industries, education, sports, etc., benefit from data visualization to make the data more understandable.
Visualizations are in the form of Charts, Graphs, Summaries/tables, Infographics, Maps, Dashboards, etc.,

Clustering

Clustering is a technique to cluster the data into groups based on similarities. Clustering has wide applications in Business Analytics. Clustering is also used to understand data, which can help businesses to analyze any possible threats or opportunities and manage them effectively to benefit the business.

For example, say a business requires to send marketing messages to about one million customers. Sending the same message to all one million customers may not be effective rather if the customers can be grouped to, say, five different categories based on several factors including customer profile and buying patterns, a business can target customized messages to each group thereby increasing the effectiveness of the campaign.

Correlation

Correlation is a bivariate analysis, meaning analysis of two variables. It is a foundational statistical measure that provides a relation between two variables. A positive correlation means that when one variable increases in value, the other variable also increases. A negative correlation means that when one variable increases in value, the other variable decreases. This relationship is quantified through a value called a correlation coefficient. The value of the correlation coefficient varies between -1 and +1

Correlation is used in Business Analytics in quantifying the relationship between two business variables. For example, sales and discounts, marketing budget and overall market share, etc.,

Factor Analysis

Factor Analysis aims to reduce the number of variables, thereby simplifying the analysis. This technique is used in descriptive analytics to do exploratory analysis as well as in predictive analytics through advanced techniques such as Machine Learning.

There are several methods for Factor Analysis and the most commonly used one is Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

Text Mining

Text Mining is a technique to explore and analyze unstructured text data, thereby derive valuable insights for the business.

Social media and microblogging platforms have resulted in an exponential increase the text data, which contains valuable business insights. But the challenge is that this text is unstructured and scattered across different platforms and channels.

Text Mining has gained huge popularity as it can help to dig into this vast amount of unstructured text data and provide insights on customers interests, feedbacks, reviews, product feature suggestions, etc., Sentiment Analysis, which comes under Text Mining has seen wide application in business such as tagging reviews as positive or negative etc.,

Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics is an advanced level of business analytics that is used to predict a business variable (target variable) based on the various other input variables (predictors).

This is made possible through recent advancements in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, a part of Artificial Intelligence. A Machine Learning model (a mathematical model) is fed with past data and fine-tune it to fit the data. This is referred to as training the model. Once the model is trained, it can predict the target variable for new input data.

Predictive analytics is a revolutionary technique, which is already adopted by most businesses across industries including Banking and Finance, Health Care, Retail, Manufacturing, IT Security, etc.,

Who should Pursue Business Analytics?

If you are a manager or aspiring to be a manager, who’s role involves in taking business decisions, then you must acquire this high-in-demand skill to not only boost your career prospects but also add significant value to the business by taking the right data-driven decision.

SKILLOGIC, a global training institute with more than a decade in business providing management training, provides the course “Business Analytics for Managers”, which is specifically structured for managers to acquire Business Analytics skills. There is no prerequisite for this course but a bit of statistics knowledge and business decision-making experience will immensely help to grasp the best of the knowledge from this course.

This course is a 6-Day (2hrs a day) Online Training Program along with globally recognized certification a European Board – International Association of Business Analytics Certification (IABAC).