Business Analytics

Business analytics is used to help people to make and execute rational decisions. This book provides a guide to businesses on how to use analytics to help drive from ideas to execution. Analytics used in this way provides full lifecycle support for business during all stages of decision-making and execution. The domain of business analytics is becoming recognized and established as a distinct profession. Many companies have created specialized business analytics teams, and several educational institutions offer courses and degrees in analytics. The people in these groups draw upon Operations Research, Statistics, and the Information Technology practices for Business Intelligence, Analytics & Optimization. Practitioners, academics, and consultants are working craft the concepts, processes, and structures needed to establish business analytics capabilities in their specific organizations. This book offers a set of proven concepts, processes, and structures that can help organizations to set up and evolve their analytics capabilities. The word analytics conjures up different images for different people depending on the function that they work in. Business and academic organizations share an enthusiastic appreciation of the realm of business analytics, but they do not necessarily have a common understanding of all that it comprises. This divergence presents organizational challenges in terms of organizational design, roles, skills development planning, educational needs, and career paths in analytics organizations. Effective application of analytics involves a confluence of traditional business, mathematical modeling and information technology capabilities. This book provides a framework for the effective interplay of these capabilities to go from ideas to execution. The framework for business analytics is also used to embed the use of business analytics into the business culture. It lays out the approach for analytics and provides guidance on how to scale analytics and how to develop analytics teams. It offers a set of proven concepts, processes, and structures that show how organizations can set up and evolve their analytics capabilities in order to achieve benefits in their strategy and operations. As a guide for practitioners and managers, the book will benefit people who work in analytics teams, the managers and leaders who manage, use and sponsor analytics, and those who work with and support business analytics teams. It includes several real world case studies on applying the concepts of business analytics to decision making to help the practitioner understand the framework and extend it to their specific need.