Business Analytics For Managers

"While business analytics sounds like a complex subject, this book provides a clear and non-intimidating overview of the topic. Following its advice will ensure that your organization knows the analytics it needs to succeed, and uses them in the service of key strategies and business processes. You too can go beyond reporting!"—Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College; coauthor, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results Deliver the right decision support to the right people at the right time Filled with examples and forward-thinking guidance from renowned BA leaders Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, Business Analytics for Managers offers powerful techniques for making increasingly advanced use of information in order to survive any market conditions. Take a look inside and find: Proven guidance on developing an information strategy Tips for supporting your company's ability to innovate in the future by using analytics Practical insights for planning and implementing BA How to use information as a strategic asset Why BA is the next stepping-stone for companies in the information age today Discussion on BA's ever-increasing role Improve your business's decision making. Align your business processes with your business's objectives. Drive your company into a prosperous future. Taking BA from buzzword to enormous value-maker, Business Analytics for Managers helps you do it all with workable solutions that will add tremendous value to your business.

The practice of business is changing. More and more companies are amassing larger and larger amounts of data, and storing them in bigger and bigger data bases. Consequently, successful applications of data-driven decision making are plentiful and increasing on a daily basis. This book will motivate the need for data and data-driven solutions, using real data from real business scenarios. It will allow managers to better interact with personnel specializing in analytics by exposing managers and decision makers to the key ideas and concepts of data-driven decision making. Business Analytics for Managers conveys ideas and concepts from both statistics and data mining with the goal of extracting knowledge from real business data and actionable insight for managers. Throughout, emphasis placed on conveying data-driven thinking. While the ideas discussed in this book can be implemented using many different software solutions from many different vendors, it also provides a quick-start to one of the most powerful software solutions available. The main goals of this book are as follows: to excite managers and decision makers about the potential that resides in data and the value that data analytics can add to business processes and provide managers with a basic understanding of the main concepts of data analytics and a common language to convey data-driven decision problems so they can better communicate with personnel specializing in data mining or statistics.

World-class guidance for delivering the right decision support to the right people at the right time A vital blueprint for organizations that want to thrive in the competitive fray, Business Analytics for Managers presents a sustainable business analytics (BA) model focusing on the interaction of IT technology, strategy, business processes, and a broad spectrum of human competencies and organizational circumstances. Proven guidance on developing an information strategy Tips for supporting your company's ability to innovate in the future by using analytics An understanding of BA as a holistic information discipline with links to your business's strategy Practical insights for planning and implementing BA How to use information as a strategic asset Why BA is the next stepping-stone for companies in the information age today Discussion on BA's ever-increasing role Filled with examples and forward-thinking guidance from renowned BA leaders Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, Business Analytics for Managers offers powerful techniques for making increasingly advanced use of information in order to survive any market conditions.

Analytics is one of a number of terms which are used to describe a data-driven more scientific approach to management. Ability in analytics is an essential management skill: knowledge of data and analytics helps the manager to analyze decision situations, prevent problem situations from arising, identify new opportunities, and often enables many millions of dollars to be added to the bottom line for the organization. The objective of this book is to introduce analytics from the perspective of the general manager of a corporation. Rather than examine the details or attempt an encyclopaedic review of the field, this text emphasizes the strategic role that analytics is playing in globally competitive corporations today. The chapters of this book are organized in two main parts. The first part introduces a problem area and presents some basic analytical concepts that have been successfully used to address the problem area. The objective of this material is to provide the student, the manager of the future, with a general understanding of the tools and techniques used by the analyst.

Don't let a fear of numbers hold you back. Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data--to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started? Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others. You'll learn how to: Identify the metrics you need to measure Run experiments and A/B tests Ask the right questions of your data experts Understand statistical terms and concepts Create effective charts and visualizations Avoid common mistakes

Expert guidance on information management for optimum customer intelligence processes Providing essential guidance for information management, this book helps you understand the basics of information management, how to design and launch customer intelligence campaigns, and optimize existing customer intelligence processes. How to align information management with company strategy Examines how to get, grow, and retain valuable customers Discusses how to optimize existing customer intelligence processes Showing you how to make extensive use of data, statistical, and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based management to drive decision making, Business Analytics for Customer Intelligence provides you with the tools your business needs to optimize you data driven processes.

Key Business Analytics will help managers apply tools to turn data into insights that help them better understand their customers, optimize their internal processes and identify cost savings and growth opportunities. It includes analysis techniques within the following categories: Financial analytics – cashflow, profitability, sales forecasts Market analytics – market size, market trends, marketing channels Customer analytics – customer lifetime values, social media, customer needs Employee analytics – capacity, performance, leadership Operational analytics – supply chains, competencies, environmental impact Bare business analytics – sentiments, text, correlations Each tool will follow the bestselling Key format of being 5-6 pages long, broken into short sharp advice on the essentials: What is it? When should I use it? How do I use it? Tips and pitfalls Further reading This essential toolkit also provides an invaluable section on how to gather original data yourself through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

Business Intelligence: The Savvy Managers Guide, Second Edition, discusses the objectives and practices for designing and deploying a business intelligence (BI) program. It looks at the basics of a BI program, from the value of information and the mechanics of planning for success to data model infrastructure, data preparation, data analysis, integration, knowledge discovery, and the actual use of discovered knowledge. Organized into 21 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the kind of knowledge that can be exposed and exploited through the use of BI. It then proceeds with a discussion of information use in the context of how value is created within an organization, how BI can improve the ways of doing business, and organizational preparedness for exploiting the results of a BI program. It also looks at some of the critical factors to be taken into account in the planning and execution of a successful BI program. In addition, the reader is introduced to considerations for developing the BI roadmap, the platforms for analysis such as data warehouses, and the concepts of business metadata. Other chapters focus on data preparation and data discovery, the business rules approach, and data mining techniques and predictive analytics. Finally, emerging technologies such as text analytics and sentiment analysis are considered. This book will be valuable to data management and BI professionals, including senior and middle-level managers, Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers, senior business executives and business staff members, database or software engineers, and business analysts. Guides managers through developing, administering, or simply understanding business intelligence technology Keeps pace with the changes in best practices, tools, methods and processes used to transform an organization’s data into actionable knowledge Contains a handy, quick-reference to technologies and terminology