DIT University Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and deep investigation of past business performance of the respective company and also the competitors to gain insight and drive business planning in an effective way. Business analytics totally focuses on developing new insights or awareness and full understanding of the business performance of own organization and also the competitors in the market based on data and statistical methods. Indifference, intelligence in past time completely focuses on using a continuous set of metrics to both calculating past performances and also act as complete hand guide for business planning, which is also based on data, statistical, probability and mathematical methods. It also uses – Data science, Data Analytics, etc.
Business analytics makes large use of statistical analysis, includes appropriate explanatory and predictive modeling methods, and fact-based management and fixed data/information driven based management to drive decision making in a better way. It is therefore closely related to management science, data science, and data analytics. Analytics used as input for driven human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions. If we talk about Business intelligence then we can see — querying, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), and alerts are there.
Analytics Include —
1. Customer analytics
2. People analytics
3. Operations Analytics
Types of analytics —
1. Decision Analytics: Which supports human decisions that the user models to reflect reasoning. Decisions are driven by these analytics or we can say that this one is for drive decisions.
2. Descriptive Analytics: gains inside data from historical data with reporting, analyzing, clustering, etc.
3. Predictive Analytics: It gives predictive modeling using statistical techniques, machine learning techniques, and data science techniques.
4. Prescriptive Analytics: It recommends decisions using optimization, simulation, assumptions, etc.
Ongoing to deep dive in Business analytics then we find it is a research discipline of identifying business needs and determining actual solutions to business problems based on deep analysis and facts. Solutions can include a new software-systems development, a development of software component, process improvement, inter or intra organizational change or in strategic planning and new policy development or changes in current policies and rules. And the person who takes out this task is called a business analyst or BA of a company.
Business analysts don’t work alone on developing software systems. Actually they are guide to software development team, link between customer and developers they are the people who are good in technical and management both at same time. Understands the need of customer in layman language and then explain the same thing to developing team in technical words that what is the need of customer.
Although, there are different role defines for Business Analyst in different organizations, which is depending upon the organization type of work, product and service offered, there can be seem an area of common ground where mostly business analysts work. The common responsibilities appear to be:
- To deeply investigate the business systems in an appropriate manner related to the company’s work i.e. searched data is relevant to own organization, taking a full (or holistic) view of the situation. This includes examining the elements of the organizational structures and staff developmental issues as well as current processes and IT systems and comparing them with new suggested one and have to prove that new ones are much better than the old ones and the company should follow the new ones.
- To evaluate the appropriate actions which is used to improve the operations of a business system. Again I must say this may require an appropriate examination of organizational structure in a relevant manner and clear staff development needs, to ensure that they are in line with any proposed process redesign or reevaluation and IT system development.
- To check out the business requirements and document it properly for the IT system support and process management using appropriate documentation standards.
We can in line this with the core business analyst role could be defined also as an internal consultancy role that has the complete responsibility for investigating business situations in relevant manner, identifying the problems related to business and evaluating options for improving business systems, defining needs and requirements and also ensuring the effective use of information systems to attain the needs of the business.
Enterprise analysis or company analysis
It Focuses on relevantly understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its new strategic and static direction, and identifying analytics initiatives which allow a business to attain those high standards strategic goals.
It also includes:
- Fabricating and maintaining the business architecture for the/of the Company.
- Conducting feasibility studies of the new product launched by the company in economic and technical world.
- Identifying and suggesting the new business opportunities and also suggesting the changes in previous one.
- Spreading and defining new business opportunities in market
- Conducting the initial risk assessment of the product.
Requirements planning and management
It Involves planning the whole requirements developing processes, determining which requirements have the highest priority for implementation, and also managing the change.
Requirements elicitation
It Describes the techniques for collecting requirements from stakeholders in a project.
- Techniques for requirements elicitation include:
- Data Analytics
- Business analytics
- Searching about trends
- Brainstorming
- Document analysis
- Defining Focus group
- Interface analysis
- Interviews/Questionnaire
- Workshops
- Reverse engineering
- Surveys
- User task analysis
- Process mapping
- Observation/job shadowing
- Design thinking
Requirements analysis and documentation
It is Describing, actually how to develop and specify the requirements in enough detail which is confined them to be implemented by a project team in a successful manner.
Analysis
The top forms of analysis are:
- Architectural analysis
- Business process analysis
- Object-oriented analysis
- Structured analysis
- Data warehouse analysis, storage and databases analysis
Roles of business analysts
As we discussed the scope of business analysis is very very wide, there are a tendency is created for business analysts to specialize in any one of the three sets of activities which be (a part) of a whole scope of business analysis, the foremost role for business analysts is to identify the business needs, provide appropriate solutions to business problems and also the link between non-technical customer and technical developer. These all are done as being a part of following set of activities.
Strategist
Organizations need to focuses on strategy matters on a continuous basis in the dynamic business world. Business analysts are going to serve this need in the modern business world. They are very good in analyzing the strategic profile and data of the organization and its working environment, and find the competitive one the they going to advising to the senior management of company on suitable policies and methods to implement that policies.
Architect
All Organizations need to introduce changes in their methods to solve new business problems which are identified by the strategy analytics, rest referred to above. Here, Business analysts are going to contribute by analyzing the relevant objectives, processes (or ways) and resources used, and going to suggesting the ways by which re-design or relevant improvements could be made in a proper manner. Particularly skills needed for this type of analysis are “soft skills”, such as appropriate knowledge of the business, requirement engineering, stakeholder analysis, and also some “hard-core skills”, such as process of business process modeling. Although all the role requires an awareness of technology and its uses, it is an IT-focused role.
3 elements are very necessary to this aspect of the business analysis effort:
- Redesign of core business processes with the help of new suggested ways.
- Application of enabling the relevant technologies to support the new core processes.
- Management of organizational change. This aspect of business analysis is also called business process improvement or popularly known as reengineering.
IT-systems analyst
Now the most important as we are talking about the IT companies, there is the quite need to align the IT development with the business system as a whole. It determines the practical approaches to implement the new changes.
