What is Data Analytics and why does it matter?

What is Data Analytics and why does it matter?

Data Analytics helps individuals and organizations make sense of data and analyze raw data for insights and trends. It is the key to extracting information and making informed business decisions.

Changes in the business landscape are providing organizations with opportunities to develop new capabilities in leveraging data to help achieve business goals. Data Analytics provide data-driven insights that can enhance business outcomes. So what exactly is Data Analytics? Let’s find out below.

What is Data Analytics?

Data Analytics is the science of discovering and interpreting the meaning behind the data that helps managers gain insights to use for decision-making. Ultimately, Data Analytics solutions enable organizations to examine large amounts of data and uncover valuable patterns, correlations, and insights.

It’s found that of companies worldwide use data analytics to drive processes and cost efficiency, which indicates that businesses consider Data Analytics solutions to be a necessary technology solution to draw conclusions from data and make better predictions.

Often, we are unable to pick up on granular trends that IT technology solutions such as Data Analytics can help us identify. Data Analytics solutions harness data to help organizations identify new opportunities and, in turn, enhance operational efficiency and financial performance. Here’s how Data Analytics solutions can help you gain significant business value:

Enhanced Decision-Making 

The success of a business is governed by decision-making. Making the right decision is often challenging for managers and staff members, as it bears significant weight that can have widespread impacts on the business.

A Data Analytics solution will help you organize masses of data, pull out the information that will provide the greatest value, and deliver it to you in a format tailored to your needs, to enable faster, better-informed business decisions. Data Analytics solutions can provide insights into where your business has been, where it can go, and what you can do to get there. They can also incorporate into the analysis external factors that impact your business, helping to direct your decision-making by leveraging data from such external sources as mobile, social, and public data.

Standardized and Flexible Reporting

Data Analytics reporting falls into two basic categories – “canned” reports and ad hoc reports.

A canned report is one that covers a particular topic, has already been developed, and is in routine use – typically being run on a regular schedule, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Such reports can enable you to track performance metrics in such areas as operations, customer service, and sales.

Ad hoc reports are not run on a schedule. A manager or other user will create such a report on an as-needed basis to address a specific business question or issue. For example, they may want to explore an unexpected change in a trend identified in the KPIs tracked through a canned report. Ad hoc reporting tools enable users to drill down to a greater level of detail within the selected data source. Users without extensive technical skills are able to create their own queries through simple functionality such as pick lists and drag-and-drop, and to display the output in a variety of different formats, such as charts, grids, and graphs.

In addition to enabling in-depth analysis, Data Analytics reporting helps make better use of staff time by empowering users with a minimum of technical expertise to automatically receive reports regularly or to create in-depth, self-serve analytical reports to aid in decision-making.

Data Translated Into Visuals

Reviewing and analyzing data can be overwhelming, especially for those who do not classify this as one of their strengths. With everyone interpreting data differently, managers need implement standardized solutions to ensure that the appropriate data are accessible to the users who need them, in an understandable and usable format.

Translating data into visuals – such as graphs, maps, and tables – better enables your team members to uncover valuable patterns, correlations, and insights.

Gain A Competitive Advantage

Data Analytics solutions help managers discover opportunities to optimize overall business performance and improve the bottom line. These technology solutions provide access to accurate, current analytics that communicate meaningful insights that can help your organization remain competitive within a rapidly changing business environment.

Additionally, Data Analytics solutions can help you leverage historical data from prior projects to forecast level of effort and costing for new projects with greater accuracy, efficiency, and confidence, enabling better-informed decisions around proposed projects.

With data playing a crucial role in decision-making and project predictability, businesses must have access to accurate data that can be delivered in a useful form to decision-makers and other end users. Data Analytics ensures that all information is organized in a way that it can be fully leveraged to complement mission-critical business decisions.

If you’re looking to employ Data Analytics solutions or other technology solutions to expedite reporting and enhance business efficiency, contact our friendly team today to learn more.