Post on 18-Oct-2014
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Dr. Barry ShepherdSenior Member, Business Analytics PracticeInstitute of Systems Science, National University of Singaporebarryshepherd@nus.edu.sg
Business Analytics Practice
How do we “do” Business Analytics?
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What is Business Analytics?
The process of extracting useful knowledge from data to solve business problems
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What is Business Analytics?
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What is Business Analytics?
• Statistical Analysis• Predictive Modeling• Association Finding• Link analysis• Data Visualisation• Graph/Network Analysis• Sequence Finding• Data Clustering• Outlier Detection• Text Mining• Many more….
• Customer Segmentation & Profiling• Customer Acquisition & Retention• Campaign & Promotion Analysis• Measure Sales Force Effectiveness• Spend Analysis• Market Basket Analysis• Demand Forecasting• Warehouse Planning• Inventory Management• Logistics Optimisation• Healthcare Management &
Optimisation• Analysis of Clinical trials• Fraud Detection• Market & Credit Risk Analysis• Many more….
The process of using techniques such as….
To perform tasks such as….
In domains such as…
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How do we “do” Business Analytics?
• I have lots of data, it must be useful, go find me some insights
• Let’s build a big data warehouse then see what we can do with it
• We have just bought XYX tool/algorithm, go use it
Start with a business problem!
Understand what data is available, needed, could be useful
Identify an analytics approach/strategy
XX
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Business Analytics Practice
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Discovery: Find me some Insights!
What is an insight?
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Finding Insights
• Insights must be useful and actionable
• Insights often happen when you are looking for something else
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Finding Insights
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Starting Hypothesis & Questions
Verify, Evaluate, Test,Explore, Visualise
New avenues to explore,Serendipitous insights
• Where do you think your inefficiencies are?
• What feedback are you getting from customers?
• Is the Pareto principle at work?(the 80/20 rule)
• What caused the anomalies, outliers?
New/Amended Hypothesis
Start with some hypotheses, questions to answer…..
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Business Analytics Pitfalls
• Remember to get off!
• Have a clear exit criterion
• Avoid perfectionism
• Do a quick first-cut solution as a ball-park measure of success
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Business Analytics Pitfalls
• What data do you have?
• What data do you need?
• What data could be useful?
Success is more often achieved by getting better data rather than tweaking an algorithm
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Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore
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