The Importance of Data Analytics in a Business
With data surrounding everything, it is no surprise that in today’s business and technology driven world, understanding the insights held within this data has become indispensable. This quest for insight has catapulted the role of Data Analyst into a highly sought-after career pathway with annual demand anticipated to reach 700,000 new recruitments by 2020.
Data Analytics involves converting raw information, which is available in masses, into useful and meaningful content. With strategic business decisions guided more from insights extracted from this data, the value of Data Analytics within a business setting is growing.
Finding new opportunities is the main business benefit gleaned. Linked with business developments, profits and increased efficiency, by incorporating Data Analytics companies have leveraged to the next level. Many smaller businesses are also investing in Data Analytics over other cognitive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or boarder machine learning functions, identifying the potential growth opportunities held through investment in analytics.
Data Analytics brings increased speed and efficiency. It gives a competitive edge and allows businesses to work faster to extract more immediate insights. Data Science takes Data Analytics one step further by extracting deeper insights from the information and adopting a macro, rather than micro, view. Whilst highly interconnected, Data Analysis typically is used to answer questions whereas Data Science looks broader to ask the questions.
The analysis is a highly interactive and hands on process. This process approaches data from a problem-solving framework and involves identifying, analysing and interpreting data which typically comes in extremely large sets. When compared with data reporting, data analysis involves extracting insights from the useful information whereas reporting solely requires the conversion of data to useful information.
Data, as the highest commodity in the modern world, is giving companies to opportunity to both anticipate and reciprocate business needs. The opportunities and challenges exposed through analytics are equipping companies to tackle decisions from a more informed perspective using methodologies that a decade ago were non-existent. Further to this, data analytics lends to real-time processing and forecasting.
From comparing website rankings to traffic flow, heightened ease of competitor analysis is another major benefit to data analytics. With improved competitor scope, companies can proactively and swiftly address any necessary change and remain on the pulse.
The next five years will continue to see the data analytics and information services fields grow between sixteen to eighteen percent according to a recent McKinsey report. Whilst promising radical change, challenges to convert data into true value are a current hurdle for businesses faced with overwhelming amounts of data. When this data is housed in multiple systems, or worse – when data is inaccessible or inaccurate, extracting insight is further challenged.
With the rapid speed of data growth and availability, the analytical scope continually broadens. With this broadening, businesses must proactively amalgamate their data. As only with this analysis will the value of Data Analytics be fully gleaned.