What is Data Analytics?

Insights about the market and customers are essential for business success. But there have always been challenges in getting those insights. In today’s digital era, you need a data analytics solution that integrates the best of analytics and data management capabilities to quickly and easily access the data and analyze the information you need—when and where you need it.

How can data analytics improve business decisions?

The ability to derive certain metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) from data can be difficult. With data scattered throughout an organization, getting integrated information in a timely manner can also prove to be problematic. Typically, getting the desired information or insights your business needs to compete often takes too long and requires too much effort.

This is often due to a probable lack of analytics capabilities. The data is readily available; but there is no available tool that provides fast access. If there were, data or business analysts could do rapid, self-service data visualization, and analysis. And again, the data is often scattered, which means staff must first manually gather the data before they can even start their analysis. For instance, due to the use of multiple sales applications, businesses likely have access to several sources of data, including marketing or financial data extracts in a CSV or Excel file format. They may even pull in additional data that was obtained on an ad-hoc basis from elsewhere. Before conducting any analysis however, the data must be merged, most likely by trying to use a spreadsheet like a database, and then building metrics or analyses from that.

This data gathering process is much more difficult and time consuming than the actual data analysis. And since it’s also very manual, it’s not repeatable, so when new analysis is needed three weeks later, that difficult and time-consuming process has to be done again.

This approach also creates a data consistency issue. Far too often, coworkers share a spreadsheet that gets updated over time. As a result, the original spreadsheet becomes out of sync, since different teams have used different versions with no one accessing a common and current source. Compound this issue with formula errors between versions and broken links inherent to spreadsheet sharing. All the typical problems that arise with spreadsheets come into play here, but even more so when trying to use a spreadsheet as a makeshift database.

There are also governance and security concerns. For team members responsible for financial planning and analysis, emailing core financial information on spreadsheets or sharing them via SharePoint (or another collaboration tool) are risky security practices that could expose your company to cybercrime.

Visualize data

Analytics has the potential to give you a detailed image of your business landscape. To help make the most of that potential, you want a smart solution that can automatically transform data into visual presentations. This allows you to see and understand patterns, relationships, and trends that might be missed with a spreadsheet of raw numbers. It also lets you create data mash-ups to get new, unique insights. You can do that without specialized training, thanks to smart technology

Skills Covered

Who Should Do The Data Analyst Course?

Tools and Technologies

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