Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

DEFINITION OF CENTRAL CONCEPTS USED IN THIS BOOK

In my previous book, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence beyond Reporting,¹ I defined “business analytics” as:

Delivering the right decision support to the right people at the right time.

This definition points out some key points to those working with BI (decision support based on simple reports) or BA (decision support based on complex analytical skills) for the first time:

• The purpose of all the data, technical expressions, servers, architectural strategies, master data management, and so on is to create decision support—that is all. The value from a DW is enabled via increased organization-wide ability to make better decisions.
• The creation of decision support based on electronically stored data involves various technical departments, analysts, and end users spread around the organization. Some clear processes must be in place for the organization to reap the full benefits of its BI investment.

Business intelligence has the potential to provide decision support to all of the functions in an organization. Using BI, the human resources department can learn which individuals in an organization are high performers and then hire, train, and reward other employees to become similar high performers. BI enables inventory managers to minimize the amount of capital in stored goods while being able to deliver what is needed. Production can minimize its costs by setting up activity-based costing programs, and so ...