Category Archives: Analytics
Spend Analytics – 5 Ws of Spend Analysis
In this post, you will learn about 5 Ws of spend analytics. In case you are a procurement professional looking to understand use cases related to spend analytics, you may find this post to be very useful. In simple words, spend analytics is about extracting insights from spend in different procurement categories. What are we spending on? First and foremost, it is important to get visibility on what items are we spending on. This can be achieved using a dashboard. This form of analytics is also called descriptive analytics. Analyzing item spends can be termed as Item spend analytics. The items can be related to direct or indirect procurement. Indirect …
Difference between Data Science & Decision Science
In this post, you will learn about the difference between data science and decision science. Those venturing out to learn data science must understand whether they want to learn data science or decision science or both. The following are some of the key questions in relation to understanding the concepts related to data science and decision science. What is data science & decision science? When do we need data and decision science as part of the analytics strategy? Are there specialized courses for decision science? What are some good websites for decision sciences? What is Data Science & Decision Science? While Data science is used to extract insights from the data …
Actionable Insights Examples – Turning Data into Action
In this post, you will learn about how to turn data into information and then to actionable insights with the help of few examples. It will be helpful for data analysts, data scientists, and business analysts to get a good understanding of what is actionable insight? You will understand aspects related to data-driven decision making. Before getting into the details, let’s understand what is the problem at hand? The school authority is trying to assess and improve the health of students. Here is the question it is dealing with: How could we improve the overall health of the students in the school? We will look into the approach of finding the …
Starting on Analytics Journey – Things to Keep in Mind
This post highlights some of the key points to keep in mind when you are starting on data analytics journey. You may want to check a related post to assess where does your organization stand in terms of maturity of analytics practice – Analytics maturity model for assessing analytics practice. In the post sighted above, the analytics maturity model defines three different levels of maturity which are as following: Challenged Practitioners Innovators At whichever level you are in terms of maturity of your analytics practice, it may be good idea to understand the following points to come up with data analytics projects. Believe that a lot of prior work is required …
Data Quality Challenges for Analytics Projects
In this post, you will learn about some of the key data quality challenges which you may need to tackle with, if you are working on data analytics projects or planning to get started on data analytics initiatives. If you represent key stakeholders in analytics team, you may find this post to be useful in understanding the data quality challenges. Here are the key challenges in relation to data quality which when taken care would result in great outcomes from analytics projects related to descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics: Data accuracy / validation Data consistency Data availability Data discovery Data usability Data SLA Cos-effective data Data Accuracy One of the most important …
Top 10 Types of Analytics Projects – Examples
In this post, you will learn about some of the most common types of data analytics projects which can be executed by the organization to realise associated business value from analytics projects and, also, gain competitive advantage with respect to the related business functions. Note that analytics projects are different from AI / ML projects. AI / ML or predictive analytics is one part of analytics. Other types of analytics projects include those related with descriptive and prescriptive analytics. You may want to check out one of my related posts on difference between predictive and prescriptive analytics. Here are the key areas of focus for data analytics projects: Cost reduction: …
Predictive vs Prescriptive Analytics Difference
In this post, you will quickly learn about the difference between predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. As data analytics stakeholders, one must get a good understanding of these concepts in order to decide when to apply predictive and when to make use of prescriptive analytics in analytics solutions / applications. Without further ado, let’s get straight to the diagram. In the above diagram, you could observe / learn the following: Predictive analytics: In predictive analytics, the model is trained using historical / past data based on supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning algorithms. Once trained, the new data / observation is input to the trained model. The output of the model is prediction in form …
Analytics Maturity Model for Assessing Analytics Practice
In this post, you will learn about data analytics maturity model which you could use to assess where does your business / organization stand on the path of using analytics to drive business value. If you represent decision-making stakeholders group and want to assess your organization readiness / capabilities to deploy analytics in order to create business value creation, you may find this post useful enough. Here is a list of other articles I posted in the recent past in relation to strategic data analytics: Top 10 analytics strategies for great data products Top 5 data analytics methodologies Here are the three broad categories / levels of data analytics maturity model: Analytically …
Top 10 Analytics Strategies for Great Data Products
In this post, you will learn about the top 10 data analytics strategies which will help you create successful data products. These strategies will be helpful in case you are setting up a data analytics practice or center of excellence (COE). As an AI / Machine Learning / Data Science stakeholders, it will be important to understand these strategies in order to deliver analytics solution which creates business value having positive business impact. Here are the top 10 data analytics strategies: Identify top 2-3 business problems Identify related business / engineering organizations Create measurement plan by identifying right KPIs Identify analytics deliverables such as analytics reports, predictions etc Gather data …
Top 5 Data Analytics Methodologies
Here is a list of top 5 data analytics methodologies which can be used to solve different business problems and in a way create business value for any organization: Optimization: Simply speaking, an optimization problem consists of maximizing or minimizing a real function by systematically choosing input values (also termed as decision variables) from within an allowed set and computing the value of the function. An optimization problem consists of three things: A. Objective function B. Decision variables C. Constraint functions (this is optional) Linear / Non-linear programming with constrained / unconstrained optimization Linear programming with constrained optimization Objective function and one or more constraint functions are linear with decision variables as continuous variables Linear programming with unconstrained optimization Objective function …
