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Emerging Theme Paper
Business Analytics
Michelle Gomez
Marymount California University
BUS 300.01

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Abstract

An organization has a variety of ways to make business decisions. Most have heard of making a decision on a gut feeling but why place your business at risk because one lacks accurate and complete data? One thing is to know the process of your work and how to perform. Another thing is to know how to work with your customers and what to offer them whether it is a good or service. Yes, these are slight steps toward attempting to expand your company and becoming successful but what if you could do more? A company wouldn’t need to go out of their way to search very far, because the ingredient needed is already within the company, it’s data. For decades entrepreneurs and those alike have created different ways of improving their business.
Henry Ford doubled wages and shortened the workday to eight hours so that employees could also become customers. i Hundreds of books have been written on how to successfully manage your business or how to close a deal. Yet so much time goes into reading books or repetitive monotonous meetings. Data can be taken for granted and overlooked, possibly under-looked; if this is the case firms may be looking at their data with an inaccurate perception. Firms may be looking only at their data in the sense of what has fluctuated (i.e. sales revenue, profits, losses) but they may lack the ability on what to do with this data once it has been revealed to them.
Data could be as valuable as a new manufacturing plant could be to a mass producer whose company is expanding because demand is at an all time high. Business data is growing at a drastic rate but many companies, big or small, have neglected the opportunities and values that data offers. A business could be more successful if it knew how to gather and analyze its data and learn to use it wisely. This is where business analytics comes in to the equation. The business dictionary defines business analytics as the process and understanding the effectiveness of various organizational operations. Business analytics can be either focused on internal or

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external processes. Different specializations exist, encompassing most major aspects of business, including risk analysis, market analysis, and supply chain analysis.ii Bloomberg Businessweek surveyed companies with revenues above $100 million and asked them if they had used a form of business analytics, 97 percent of them said yes, but only one of four organizations thought it had been an effective form of helping to make decisions.iii The one in three organizations would benefit to learn from the other three organizations, as could the other three percent that doesn’t use any form of analytics.

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Introduction

Data is raw, unsummarized, and unanalyzed facts such as volume of sales, level of costs, or number of customers. iv Data is meaningless if it is not organized in a way that is understandable and that can communicate useful knowledge to the people wanting to interpret it into actions to better a company. Many companies include internal databases that are electronic collections of consumer and marketing information obtained from data sources within the company. Managers can readily access this information to identify marketing opportunities and problems, plan programs, and evaluate performance. Business analytics can provide for a competitive advantage, says one analyst, “Locked within your own records is a huge, largely untapped asset that no competitor can hope to match, companies are sitting on a gold mine of unrealized potential in their current customer base.” v
Different departments of a business can provide different and useful information; the marketing department can give information on customer demographics,