When Should Business Analytics Be Used?

A few considerations should be made before defining when a Business Analytics (BA) solution should be implemented. Let’s begin by establishing the main differences against Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

BI is data-driven decision-making. It includes the generation, aggregation, analysis, and visualization of data to inform and facilitate business management. BI is not strictly related to technology. It also involves the processes and procedures that support data collection, sharing, and reporting. The primary purpose is to allow data driven decisions, and increase business value by having reports and visualization dashboards.

BA is all about how you can break down data to assess trends over time, including the ways data is visualized to identify trends, and relationships at a glance.

If BI is about making decisions, analytics is about asking questions. BI is looking in the rearview mirror, and using historical data from one minute ago to many years ago. BA is looking forward, anticipating changes. It’s important to know the distinction, as both will provide different insights. BI is important to improve your decision-making based on past results, while BA will help you move forward.

Service Scope

C2S Consulting’s Business Analytics services have helped innumerable clients expand and improve their structured and unstructured data usage.

We provide full support to all stages of Business Analytics lifecycle, including: planning, designing, building, and deploying.

Many businesses need fast, efficient and agile reactions when a problem occurs. Our Business Analytics solutions include:

  • Overall scope definition of the client’s business intelligence project
  • Roadmap development and implementation for proper data governance / management
  • Data warehouse development, design, and upgrades completion
  • Data integration services, both on premise and on cloud
  • Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analytics and Spearheading Advanced Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) designs, development, and optimization
  • Customized / interactive business operations reports based on client’s specs
  • Data warehousing foundation development and building to enable third-party service tools
  • Writing and managing queries against the data warehouse to archive data, add partitioning, and remove compressed data

Our services rely on a robust experience on IBM Business Intelligence and Business Analytics tools, such as:

  • Cognos Business Intelligence
  • IBM Data Management – DB2
  • Unified Governance – Data Integration – IBM InfoSphere DataStage
  • Unified Governance – Data Integration – IBM InfoSphere QualityStage
  • IBM InfoSphere Identity Insight

What are the Benefits of Business Analytics?

Business Analytics (BA) revolves around one of the most important assets of a company: DATA. It is an essential part of the technologies set used to dramatically reduce the cost of operations and increase the efficiency of processes.

The following are some of the benefits of BA:

  • Employees are empowered to improve the bottom line
  • Lasting changes begin happening bottom up, rather than top down
  • Managers reduce micromanagement stress
  • It’s easier to have business stakeholders making predictive decisions
  • Data improves communication allowing a new focus on facts, rather than subjective experiences
  • Flexibility for repeated testing
  • Business history to help future predictions
  • Company growth relies on data
  • Competitive edge vs. competitors