The ideas around business analytics are quite volatile. It dwells in an everlasting state of murky confusion. Alright, enough with trying to be philosophical. But really the combination of business and analytics somehow manages to escape understanding and people confuse it with all sorts of things. This puts a veil around the real benefits that businesses can gain from a BA professional. On the other hand a lot of skilled professionals miss out on great opportunities. Let us draw some lines, distinguish business analytics as a separate skill, and finally understand its impact.
What is business analytics?
Just as the name suggests, it is a melting pot of business and data analytics. As you all know that data analytics refers to the study of the various techniques and procedures employed to analyze and understand data. When data analytics is used to understand and improve a business, it is called business analytics.
How is it different from data analytics?
It has more similarities than dissimilarities with data analytics. Professionals working in both these disciplines work with data – they clean, process, and visualize data to draw insights. The difference is that while data analysts focus more on the data and the best ways to process it, business analysts focus more on the interpretation of data to improve business. To gather more knowledge on this, read about the differences between a business analyst & a data analyst.
How is it different from business intelligence?
Business intelligence deals with a company’s past and how the same affects its present. It dwells on sales reports, and customer reviews to understand the present situation and to track progress of the business. Business intelligence is all about reports and visualizations.
Business analytics deals with company data and factors in other data data sources not only to understand what has been going on with the business but also to figure out proactive ways of engaging more customers and improving business processes.
The role of a business analyst
Once you have grasped the differences between business analyst, data analyst and business intelligence professionals, you can now move on to get a better idea of the role of a business analyst in a company.
A business analyst can work in a number of different capacities. Let us look at a few of those.
Finding problems in business process
A business analyst needs a good eye for problems that otherwise go unnoticed. While going through company data, a business analyst should be able to perceive the problems hidden in small deviations in data.
Conveying the problem
The business analyst should be able to create a compelling report about the problem he or she has noticed and move the management to action to redress the issue. This can be done through data visualization and effective communication.
Bridging the gap between different parts of the company
A talented business analyst is usually gifted with great interpersonal as well as story-telling skills. They are responsible for ensuring that the different sections of an enterprise are on the same page regarding a certain issue that concerns all of them. A business analyst has a combined skill set of analytics tools, technical acumen, and domain knowledge. These skills are what make a BA professional an ideal bridge between the developers and the executives.
Devising business strategy
A business analyst can use predictive analysis to derive various insights regarding business processes, product development, pricing, warehouse management, among a lot of different things. Since business analysts are equipped with analytic skills and domain knowledge, they can bring a lot of dexterity on the table.
Tools used by business analytics professionals
Business analysts have lots of choices in terms of tools. We will talk about only the most popular ones.
SQL
SQL stands for standard query language and it is used to extract desired data from databases. This is an important skill for both data analysts and business analysts.
Tableau
Data visualization is a key part of business analytics as well as business intelligence. It is the data visualization that gives the company something solid to work with. Tableau is one of the best visualization tools.
Python
While Python is more easily associated with software developers and machine learning professionals, business analysts can step up their game by attending a Python data science course. Not only do Python skills enable business analysts to make more of the data, they also increase their employability significantly.
Businesses around the world have started to realize the potential of business analytics, consequently, the demand for BA professionals is on an all-time high. The opportunities are abundant. Are you ready?
