History of business analytics
Analytics has come into the human world due to the rapid progress of humans in almost all fields. Human beings were nomads in the beginning, but once they analyzed the relationships of fire and meat, plants and consumption of their seeds, the building of houses and living in a safe environment at night, progress and evaluation knocked upon our doors. Hence, analysis has always been a part of human nature. Similarly, the business has also been a means of survival for a number of human beings. It started with the barter system and now we have the recent advent of Bitcoin. Combining both these ways of life, hence, makes so much sense. Business analytics is an important part of any organization, but it is basically a way of life. We need business analytics to understand some of the greater terms like consumerism, unemployment, marketing strategies, customer management, services etc.
- W. Taylor is responsible for the advent of business analytics. However, Henry Ford worked on it and gave it the form as we know it now. Business analytics can be considered as the predecessor of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence methods as well. In business analytics, past data sets are studied to find a pattern or a general observation in order to predict future trends or marketing patterns. Consumerism is the basis of a number of industries in today’s world and business analytics has paved the way for such a system.
The process of analyzing the customer’s buying pattern subject to the various political and socioeconomic factors and then creating a report for the same to design marketing campaigns is basically business analytics. Querying plays a huge role here as the dataset is used to clear all the possible questions that can help future predictions. Problem-solving techniques have also been designed after the report of a business analyst has been published. Such reports can also explain past problems, trends and help business professionals to understand why certain campaigns and ideas did not work as expected.
There are four types of analytics: descriptive, decision, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Predictive analytics uses a number of methods that are already employed by machine learning. Decision analytics is a means of supporting human reasoning using visual guides and reports. Descriptive analytics uses past data to build future predictions and reports. Prescriptive analytics is bent on creating the optimal solution that will benefit everyone involved in the business.
Any business analyst would agree that the entire process of querying, studying and finally predicting and reporting requires an immense amount of data. This data helps in better prediction and formation of new ideas to attract more consumers. It is now a major branch of studies and a number of well-deemed universities are offering this course. Recent studies also show that proper analysis can also lead to the prediction of the performance of an organization in the future and the time it can remain in business. This serves to be a very important advantage and can help in the constant evolution of an organization to suit the interests of the customers.
Business analytics is an important part of the modern world and with the continuous development of better technology, it might be instrumental in building and breaking empires.