Business Analytics Principles, Concepts, and Applications: What, Why, and How

Preface

Like the face on the cover of this book, we are bombarded by information every day. We do our best to sort out and use the information to help us get by, but sometimes we are overwhelmed by the abundance of data. This can lead us to draw wrong conclusions and make bad decisions. When you are a global firm collecting millions of transactions and customer behavior data from all over the world, the size of the data alone can make the task of finding useful information about customers almost impossible. For that firm and even smaller businesses, the solution is to apply business analytics (BA). BA helps sort out large data files (called “big data”), find patterns of behavior useful in predicting the future, and allocate resources to optimize ...