Advanced Analytics in Business is Opening Door to New Possibilities

Advanced analytics acts as an umbrella model that involves many disciplines and has broad applicability in business

Big data and analytics have reached the heights that no one has ever imagined. Businesses purely live on these technologies in the digital world. The trend to look for more data and analytic solutions is still on hype. Organizations are looking for a single technology that could cover most of their needs. Advanced Analytics emerge from their void expectation.

Even though technology has opened door to many business possibilities, some companies are unsure about how to proceed with them. Organizations are not ready or willing to take big data and analytics seriously. There is a general misconception that advanced technology trends are only applicable/useful for big corporations like Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. Companies also worry about the money they have to spend on all these technologies. However, advanced analytics comes for their rescue. Advanced analytics acts as an umbrella model that involves many disciplines and has broad applicability. It can be availed in the marketing department to understand customer preferences and their behavioral changes. Executive teams can plan strategy and campaigns based on the analytics results. In a manufacturing base, advanced analytics is used to understand the outflow of products to keep up with the market demand. They can also create self-maintaining systems to prevent expensive machinery breakdowns.

What is Advanced Analytics?

As Gartner has put, 'Advanced Analytics is the autonomous or semi-autonomous examination of data or content using sophisticated techniques and tools, typically beyond those of traditional business intelligence (BI), to discover deeper insights, make predictions, or generate recommendations.' In simple terms, advanced analytics help businesses get more out of their data. The technology leverages a possibility for organizations to function on 'what if' calculations based on its predictive capabilities that are used to forecast trends, events and behaviours. Artificial intelligence, semantic and graphic analysis, data and text mining, complex event processing, pattern matching, predictive analytics, data visualisation, sentiment analysis, network and cluster analysis, multivariate statistics, simulation, neural networks, etc. are some of the areas that advanced analytics covers. As technology grows and more trends come in, advanced analytics will include them in its functionality.

Besides, advanced analytics facilitates data science for businesses to use their mature methods to project future trends and anticipate potential events. Even though futuristic technologies like BI and analytics are already doing the job of anticipating the future, advanced analytics gives further deeper insight into it. Some of the benefits of using advanced analytics in business are listed below.

• Advanced analytics encourages users to enable data sharing and allows the organization to produce fast, dependable insights and improve the value of business analysis across the enterprise.

• Advanced analytics tools make it easier for business users and data scientists to gather, integrate and analyze data.

• The technology is characterized by simplified integration processes that remove bottlenecks and eliminate duplicative data modeling.

• It boosts agility by enabling organizations to predict and proactively respond to future events.

• Firms using advanced analytics can make use of the past and current data to detect any management risk that might up in the future.

Applications of advanced analytics in business

Picking the right data

Data is becoming critical in the evolving digital era of social media and machine sensors. This has laid out the red carpet for businesses to take many data-driven decisions. Data is making business processes easy by analyzing and coming up with data-driven answers. However, the base of all this is identifying and collecting the right data. Companies mostly have the data they need. The major problem they face is to make the data operational. Advanced analytics tools helps organizations to see which data will suit which purpose. They also help businesses arrange data in a structured manner that is ready for analysis anytime.

Creating business models to optimize outcomes

Even though data is the core of every business operation, creating a model that supports the company starts from identifying the opportunities. One such technique is data mining that allows companies to run dozens of statistical tests to identify submerged patterns. But this too will turn unsuccessful if the executives can't effectively use the correlations to enhance business performance. However, advanced analytics can do the job to a certain extent as it functions on the product, customer, sales, competitor and other valuable data. Advanced analytics helps organizations to build the best business model that suits their working system.