Joy Beatty

Let Decisions Be Your Guide

Business analytics projects: Using decisions as a basis to prioritize and identify requirements

Most normal people don’t look at data sets just for fun. They study views of the data to make decisions about what to do, be it a decision to take some specific action or a decision to do nothing at all. The main purpose of business analytics projects is to develop systems that turn large and often highly complex data sets into meaningful information from which decisions can be made.

The decisions that people make using business analytics systems can be strategic, operational, or tactical. For example, an executive might look at his sales team’s global performance dashboard to decide who to promote (tactical), which products need different marketing strategies (operational), or which products to target by markets (strategic). Generally speaking, all software systems that include an analytics component should enable users to make decisions that improve organizational performance in some dimension.

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