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Building a business analytics architecture(SMB Advisor Middle East Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Analytical ability in sorting the wheat from the chaff is key to doing real BA, says Carel Badenhorst, Head Technology Practice at SAS Institute Middle East Not so long ago, there was no apparent need for server farms, no need for offsite storage and no need to bother with collecting and storing all business data. Very quickly, in the past seven years in fact, times have changed significantly and irrevocably. The realisation that the collection and storage of copious amounts of operational data could be used to create a competitive advantage has taken root. Today there are global corporate databases which are starting to reach petabytes of data (a quadrillion bytes). The new question that bears answering is: How do I turn this data into competitive advantage? Enter business analytics (BA), an effective combination of methodologies and software capabilities enabling the corporate world to make better and more informed business decisions for the sake of the customer, based on the needs of the customer. Business intelligence (BI) provided (and still provides) the ability to run management information reports on the data – giving a tabular, graphical or additional visual technique enabling the understanding of one's historic business past. But the data space's expanding and evolving to incredible proportions and complexity is forcing a metamorphosis in the traditional nature of the BI landscape as we knew it. The changing architecture Business analytics means an additional ability over and above the normal capabilities provided by traditional BI. Being able to analyse copious amounts of data effectively to provide competitive advantage takes more than just collecting, storing and visualisation of data. Competitive advantage comes from one thing and one thing only, the ability to answer any and all of your business questions and make business decisions appropriately, irrespective of whether the questions are about the past (which is the limit for BI), present or future (which is where you achieve competitive advantage). All of these past, present and future business decisions should be driven from the data that you spend so much time and money in collecting, and having an advanced analytical capability at the heart of your business intelligence architecture is the only way to achieve competitively advantageous decisions. Are you running business intelligence or business analytics? To analyse whether your decision making is based on business intelligence or business analytics, try and answer the following questions for yourself: Is my data appropriate? You know you have a lot of data – both the amount of variables and the volumes of data – but how appropriate is the data. This is a most important question, because the appropriateness of data cannot be determined by humans. This is a question that can only be answered by using complex analytical algorithms that will explore, weigh, score and identify which of the variables in your operational databases is necessary and useful in making business decisions. Analytical ability in sorting the wheat from the chaff is key to doing real business analytics. Do I really understand why? The first logical step after business intelligence shows you your historic business is Why? "Why did I lose those 1,000 customers last month in Dubai?" "Why did I sell only AED 20 worth of product in Abu Dhabi during the month of June?" The importance of analytical methodologies and routines, to ensure accuracy in answering these questions, may be influenced by an organisation's current ability to use intuition, experience or gut feel to answer these questions. Intuition, experience or gut feel reside in people – and people are prone to churn or worse, make a wrong decision. Analytics should be there to provide a consistent, repeatable, reliable confirmation of gut feel. So what now? After you analytically accurately understand the "why", the final step would be "what". You now need the ability to play with scenarios, understand "what ifs", and optimise both of these questions to ensure that you take the best possible decision that could lead to competitive advantage. All of this done by the analytics, using your data. What else should you know about BA? The need for analytically based, intelligent decision making is required by all functions in today's organisations – from management, department heads, salespeople, analysts, through to the statisticians. This intelligence needs to be tapped into by all the different departments – in a way that empowers them and doesn't overwhelm them – quickly, reliably and accurately. The luxury of taking weeks to make complex decisions in a dynamic business environment, where the questions change on a daily basis, is a thing of the past. The only means of providing a scalable, integrate-able, powerful and easy-to-use environment for competitive advantage is to make the mind shift from business intelligence to business analytics. In recent research conducted by consulting firm Accenture, organisations admitted that the need to access data through a variety of channels was highlighted as critical, as more and more companies admitted to using BI tools (and in turn analytics) to build "competitive advantage". In the report companies admitted that this included the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models and decision making. In addition to which Accenture’s High Performance Business research found a powerful link between organisations with pronounced analytical orientations and market out-performance. About Carel Badenhorst brings 10 years of experience in business analytics enablement competency areas. These include organisational readiness assessments, data acquisition, data quality and data warehousing processes, On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), analytics for business, intelligence dissemination processes, the continuity and sustainability of business intelligence in organisations through business intelligence competency centres and value delivery management. He holds a four year Law degree from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and a post graduate Masters Degree specialising in Business Intelligence (MSc in BI) from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. SAS provides business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data. (c) 2011 CPI Financial. All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |