What is business analytics? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] For the modern employee, one of the most important skills to have for advancing your career is competency in business analytics. Let's talk about what that means and why it's so important. First of all, what exactly is business analytics? Well, business analytics essentially just involves taking data and turning it into insights. You probably hear all the time about how the world is awash in data and there's new data being created every day. And that's true, but data by itself is not that useful. In fact, in order for data to have value we need to understand what the data is telling us. We need to be able to turn it into useful information. And that's what business analytics is all about. This might sound easy, but in practice, it's not, there's a number of different challenges that come up. How do we get that data? What's it telling us? How do we apply the results, and where is it useful to our business? Now, business analysts sometimes get conflated with project managers. Basically the two are distinct though. The business analyst is focused on the needs of the business. In other words, they focus on understanding the business's requirements, understanding what the business is doing currently, understanding what's going on with the firm, in terms of its key areas and understanding how the firm can drive itself forward. In other words, taking data and deriving insight from it. For the project manager, they're more focused on driving forward a specific project, right? This could include as an example understanding how that project is going to impact the firm. What's the planning on that project look like? As we get started with moving that project forward, project manager is going to be monitoring it, overseeing it making sure it stays on track, going through and understanding what the project is going to solve, what challenges for the business it'll overcome and how that project can help drive the company forward. So project management role is generally both narrower and higher level than a business analyst role which could be a little bit broader, but often encompasses wide arrays of different aspects of the company. What is it that goes into business analytics? Well, there's a lot of different areas here, right? Data aggregation, taking lots of data putting it together into useful insights. Going through and mining that data, understanding what's happening in the data and what the data's telling us extrapolating new information from that data, new correlations, new trends, etc. Business analytics also extends to areas that are a little newer though that you might be familiar with, textual analysis. for instance, that is taking text data, taking text information, say from social media or from marketing campaigns and putting it into usable insights for the firm. Business analytics also encompasses forecasting. How do we figure out what's happened in the past, and what we think is going to happen going forward. That's what a business analytics focuses on, business analytics also covers optimization. How can the company improve its profitability is our price optimized. Should we be doing something different with our labor scheduling or our marketing spend, for instance. all of these are within the domain of business analytics. Data visualization is another big area in business analytics. Essentially this just involves going through and taking large amounts of data and then putting it into a digestible easy to understand format for decision-makers. It's hopefully you're starting to see at this point business analytics is a very big field and it's applicable to almost every company that's out there, large or small. Take a few minutes and think about how your firm operates. Are there areas where business analytics and in particular, data, could be helpful for your firm? How do you deal with those challenges and what could be done differently?