Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

ANALYTICS’ FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Before addressing performance execution and tracking, we believe it is important to go back to the basics and review the fundamental business questions that analytics aims to address. We will then evaluate how those questions resonate into business actions. Regardless of the organization, business challenges that analytics must address often fall into one of the following categories:

• Reduce cost
• Increase market share
• Increase customer retention
• Increase customer acquisition
• Increase profitability

The fundamental questions remain the same and are about analyzing, understand, monitoring, measuring, and planning:

• What has happened?
• What is happening now, and why is this happening?
• What will happen?

Once completed, analytics findings can then be shared with the rest of the business. Those findings provide answers to the aforementioned questions and are directed toward a clear business outcome. Exhibit 16.2 illustrates how analytics questions are translated into fundamental business questions that will drive the execution of the company’s strategy and address its business challenges.

Exhibit 16.2 Advanced Business Analytics Questions

The future side of Exhibit 16.2 (What will happen? What should we do?) is the main focus of this chapter; it is the key aspect of performance tracking and execution. This is because the goal of business analytics is ...