What is Business Analytics and 5 Ways to Learn it from Scratch?

Understanding Business Analytics

When it comes to answering the question “What is Business Analytics”, it is wise to take an analogous approach rather than a direct one. The direct approach will say that a business analyst analyses business data and arrives at insight regarding what has gone wrong and what is going well and proposes ways to capitalise on the gains while minimising the losses. All of this is perfectly fine — and you may even say that no further explanation is necessary!

But the analogous approach comes closer to conveying a better sense of what business analytics is all about. It’s a high school graduate, with prospectuses from various colleges open in front of you, trying to decide which college to go to. Of course, this assumes that you have all the admission letters just waiting for you, although that needn’t be the case at all. No matter the case, you have to look at your track record in school and look at the college’s track record that you would like to go to. And not only this, but you also have to think about the kind of career prospects that you will get from a particular college. Still, further, you will have to consider whether these career prospects are the right ones for you.

For instance, would it be better for you to go to a college that is very highly reputed, but which doesn’t have the same course that you’re looking to do? On the flip side, would it be worth the trade-off if you go to a college that offers precisely the course you’re looking for, but which is relatively new, and may not afford you the kind of career opportunities that you would like?

It may seem unrelated to business analytics, but a scenario like that is precisely the kind of scenario that a professional business analyst will have to deal with on a daily basis. Sure, it won’t be college prospectuses or websites — it’ll be excel sheets and company projections. It’ll be a lot of thinking at the level of data, and a lot of analysis of said data to arrive at insights that can help a company make the right decisions that will work out for them in the long run. Additionally, it will also mean highlighting trouble areas where things haven’t worked out and why that has been the case. Should that situation be avoided in the future, or is there a possibility of things turning around?

As a business analyst, a lot will depend on the work you will do on a daily basis. So needless to say, your job will be a significant one! And now that we’ve got that cleared let’s take a look at what business analytics will be responsible for.

Responsibilities of a Business Analyst

As a role that straddles the gap between management, data, and business decisions, a business analyst plays a structurally significant but somewhat flexible role. In most situations, it depends entirely on the company that one is working for, but some similarities occur across roles in various industries.

Let’s take a look at some of them here:

1. We are providing business analysis reports, outlining opportunities, problems, and solutions for a business.
2. They are using predictive models to understand the scope of suggested changes as well as their business impact.
3. Pricing, reporting, planning, and monitoring aligns with business vision and requirement and communicating this to the stakeholders responsible for making the decisions.

You can think of Business Analysts as the ones that make sure that all the other teams work in conjunction with each other by serving as a conduit for information exchange between them. What IT teams may be in full agreement with may not work out for Marketing or R&D, for example — but the Business Analytics department of any organisation needs to make sure that all business decisions make fiscal sense at the end of the day.

A business analyst will have to optimise costs and ensure that all the reporting requirements and regulatory guidelines are being strictly followed. Not only this, but they also need to have a thorough understanding of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Result Areas (KRAs).

You would be right in thinking that this sounds like too much work. So if this degree of diversity in a role that you’ll have to play every day isn’t something that excites you, then you should probably be thinking about another position where you can express yourself more freely with a narrower set of prerequisites.

But the truth of the matter is that the role of a business analyst is still relatively new. It emerged as a response to urgent business requirements that no other role could meet. With that being said, the role itself isn’t set in stone — there is much about it that is constantly evolving and developing as time progresses, and more and more requirements are found. The older an organisation, the more their problems will lie on the side of modernising legacy systems and making sure their teams are not working in silos. The newer an organisation is, the more their issues will be along the lines of tracking data in the right way and ensuring that every cent spent delivers the right kind of value. So there’s a lot to be excited about, no matter where you go!

How to learn Business Analytics from Scratch?

Where there’s a will, there’s away! And the best thing about the rapid boom in online learning is that it directly translates into the availability of a plethora of online resources that you can use to make sure that you have all the tools you need to succeed as a business analyst!

So where should you turn, exactly? The interwebs are a vast space, and it can be effortless to get lost in them. But worry not — here are some of the best resources available that you can use for your benefit. They are primarily of 2 types: online courses for business analytics, and an offline source of information — books!

1. upGrad’s Business Analytics Certification Program: Yet another course that delivers promising results, this 11-month course by upGrad ground you in the industry through relevant notes, tools, assignments, and mentorship. It covers crucial concepts like business problem solving, exploratory data analysis, predictive analytics and more. Not only does it offer over 100 hours of learning through recorded videos, but it also offers students the chance to participate in more than three live projects, providing enough to guarantee that they’ll have industry-relevant takeaways from the 11-month long course.
2. Coursera’s Business Analytics Specialisation: This is an ideal course for those starting, since it covers all the required information, even for those who have no experience at all! Not only does this course cover important materials like describing, predicting, and informing business decisions, but it also takes you through a real-life project where you have to work with real-life data, making your experience all the more industry-relevant!
3. LinkedIn Learning’s Become a Business Analytics Expert: Featuring ten courses with a total runtime of just over 10 hours, this is a course that’s more suitable for those who already have a certain amount of experience in statistics and data analysis in general. It will help you integrate those principles with business functions and needs, so that you may come up with business-relevant insights. This course will take you through detailed planning for business strategies using advanced statistical methods. In addition to this, you will also be able to create quantifiable predictive models and evaluate the effectiveness of various tools and data techniques in line with what a business requires.
4. Udacity’s Business Analytics Nanodegree: A 3-month degree will help you gain foundational data analysis skills that can be used across industries. Primarily working with SQL, Excel, and Tableau, this course familiarises each student with the process of collecting and analysing data with Excel, simulate business scenarios as well as query databases using SQL, and ultimately visualise any and all findings through Tableau. Another bonus for this course is that you can do this without any prerequisite knowledge required, and you will also be given career guidance and mentorship support. So really, this course will do an excellent job for you as well!

You can look at some of the following books on business analytics and other topics surrounding it. They will make your life much easier and will go very far in equipping you with the right kind of tools required to be a great business analyst!

Business Analytics: The Science of Data-Driven Decision Making by Dinesh Kumar

A Practitioner’s Guide to Business Analytics: Using Data Analysis Tools to Improve Your Organization’s Decision Making and Strategy by Randy Bartlett.

Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight by Priyanka Jain

Business Analytics by Jeffrey D. Camm, et. al

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic