There is much debate over exactly what analytics is. A major proportion of this debate is purely semantics, as technical persons struggle to relate technology in business terms. In reality, the business doesn’t really care what it is called – they care about what it does. Analytics goes beyond traditional reporting and data mining – it passes by the what happened and where, and gets right to the why it happened. Using this insight, analytics and modeling tools can help predict the most likely outcomes of various future scenarios.
Reporting and data mining are a great place to start if you are just emerging on your Business Intelligence roadmap, but it is Analytics that will really drive your business to new competitive heights.
Just downloaded a very good whitepaper from Quantivo that provides an overview of how we can dig deeper below our normal web analytics to gain more insight into customer behaviour. Those of you who know me know how much a fan of cloud computing and business intelligence I am, and Quantivo has developed a great cloud SaaS application to enable all businesses to gain access to this valuable insight. I know this sounds like an ad [no, I am not getting paid to say this] – but I am just such a fan of making BI available for everyone.
Identify specific behaviour after:
Purchasing a product
Viewing a page or ad
Interacting with online content
Watching an online video
This helps you categorise each visitor as either “actively researching information, ready to purchase, or simply looking”
Take a quick look at this short video [4 mins]
The application also has an affinity database which provides relationship insight from relevant behavioral patterns to help you identify that big grey hole – the one where you don’t know what you don’t know!
The current climate has highlighted the need for more information, faster, and in a format that is instantly usable. As companies seek to avoid the trap of massive discounting they are turning to analytics to identify opportunities to instead increase value, through bundling products with smaller, incremental margins.
Analytic insights about customers, products, channels, partners and pricing is only half of the solution. The other half being the profitable and strategic application of the information revealed from the analyltics. Thus, decision making is not wholly handed off to analytics. In the four step decision making process: framing the issue, intelligence negotiating outcomes and ongoing learnings gains immensely when the intelligence part of the equation is from valid data, rather than relying on accurate recollection of personal memory.
Thus, analytics must be integrated into the conceptual framework of decision management. This framework encapsulates not only the process used for decision making, but the business rules applied to the process, and the outcomes from each stage of the process.
Adding analytical insight into the decision making process is providing better operational decisions and more integrated strategies.
