A Research Study On Analytics

Considering this evolution, "in the past, analytics was reserved for back-room deliberations by data geeks generating monthly reports on how things are going. Today, analytics make a difference in how the company does business, day by day, and even minute by minute". (Hackathorn, R., 2013).

Plotting my exam scores on a graph to see my performance on a subject was an activity back in my school. The ups and downs on the graph helped me identify my positives and negatives. As a kid, this kindled my passion towards analytics. While studying engineering at Kumaraguru College of Technology, I had to carry out various analyses for my experiments and projects. This further developed my interest in analytics. Being a part of the League for Entrepreneurial Empowerment and Development (LEED), gave me an opportunity to start a business at college.

Analytics have become a major aspect of Higher Education. Community Colleges service a multitude of students therefore analytics is an essential tool to keep track of the progress of the students as well as the services that they are provided. The boom of community colleges utilizing analytics occurred in 2004 with the Achieve the Dream initiative. Achieving the Dream was created with the attentions of providing resources for students who “traditionally have faced the most significant barriers to success, including low-income students and students of color” (www.mdrc.org). Prior to this initiative, many community colleges focus was only on increasing enrollment. However, analytics provided a push towards measuring student success.

Soon, predictive data analytics will provide a refined synthesis of collected data which will produce in-depth outcomes that can be applied in all sorts of situations. In the selection of courses, the data collected from social media, school’s electronic swipe cards, departmental data among other sources could enable the matching of students with the appropriate professors and subjects or programs. One such program is being applied by the Regents Online Campus partnership which begun the pilot program in 2012 by using a predictive data analytics tool from “Desire2Learn”.

In the past, many organizations including community colleges, have relied on gut feel or perception rather than the quantitative and qualitative data that support the school’s mission, vision and values. The use of data here at CACC has been limited to annual federal and state reporting. This reporting has been done by a few people with little or no input from the departments. When the topic of data was presented comments such as “where is that information going from”, “our data has never been right” or the system has never pulled the correct information” has been the common responses.

As coined in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Aisha Sultan, “Data is the new world currency.” Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and then summarizing it into useful information. In essence is it applying all different types of what if scenarios on large swaths of data to get possible results to aid in better decision making. This sort of decision making isn’t something new, it’s the technology aiding the decision making that is new. This has reduced the amount of time it takes in the decision making process and given the

Competing on analytics is currently one of the most essential qualities for companies looking to gain a larger market share in their given industry. This is due to the fact that the easiest way for corporations to differentiate themselves from their direct competitors is to maximize efficiency through cohesive processes and decision making. Analytics is defined as, “The extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact based management to drive decisions and actions.” (Davenport, 2007, p.7) So in order for companies to compete on analytics they need to be willing to invest in the proper technologies that are able to compile all of this information and data into output that can be used

The term “Big Data” has been around for quite some time and has been catching everyone’s attention with remarkable speed. A plethora of questions do pop up in our mind sometimes. What is big data, is this something absolutely new, how can it be leveraged to create value for an organization and so on. For many years, companies have used various transactional records stored in relational databases to make competitive business decisions. But how long can we sustain or depend on these traditional methods of doing analysis and coming to a conclusion. There is an ocean of non-traditional, less structured data such as weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined not only for useful information but also to make strategic decisions.

analytics beyond commerce to healthcare strategies, hiring processes, and personal life (Bayan, 2015; Germann, Lilien, & Rangaswamy 2012; Tavana, Kennedy, & Joglekar 1996). Regardless of the industry, analytics have legitimacy absent context and provide insight to the working of a structure. Organizations could, and often dp argue, that awareness of the power of analytics is enough; however, for analytics to be of the greatest support, their merit and worth is not in the capture and analyzation of data but in the application of it within a specific context. Analytics provide insight that can be

Being successful with analytics is about having the right mindset, the right organizational model, and the right strategy.” (Gartner, 2014)

Business Analytics is a field that is becoming popular in the business world as the year’s progress. There is always something new in the world of business to help improve companies and their sales. The success of using analytics to help develop a company is encouraging others to join this way of studying data to make decisions that will benefit the profit of the company. The increased use of data to increase sales, revenue and to help make business decisions is a large part of the sports industry. For years, teams have used analytics to make decisions on what players to draft, positions to place players in, as well as many other parts of the game. Analytics has been a large part of not only game play, but also for the business aspects

Analytics, quantitative or statistical models to analyze problems may be applied to a variety of business problems, including customer management, supply chains, financial performance and many other. It is the back bone of any organization which helps in effective decision making. Today, it has creeped into each and every industry and has created a “perish or persist” scenario to the industries.

Since higher education has blurred the lines with traditional businesses, it is important to have the tools to assist them with valuable data and information, in making decisions. Using of data and having the right data mining tools can insure the institute’s success, in many forms, such as, identifying market trends, precision marketing, new products, performance management, grants and funding management, student life cycle management and procurement to mention a few. To get a better grasp on these benefits it’s important to understand data warehouse, data mining and the associated benefits.

”Enterprises need to be able to quickly respond to an ever-changing world in order to stay competitive. A constantly changing world requires a constant flow of decisions – where even postponing a decision is a decision in itself. Hence, the value of analytics is not to be interpreted as merely a set of features in a tool; it is more of a set of principles for improving the process of your decision-making.”, states Capgemini author Anders Bresell.

With its emphasis on improving online interaction between an organization and its website users, web analytics is frequently considered to be in the realm of marketing. While web analytics does provide important support for today’s online marketing efforts, its impact and usefulness does not stop there. Web analytics can play a much broader role in an organization. Web analysts have very good reasons to be involved with web analytics activities underway in their organizations. To avoid problems with performance degradation and insufficient resource capacity, performance analysts need to be informed about web analytics implementation projects. Ideally, they should be part of the web analytics implementation team. At a minimum, the performance team should be kept informed of plans and progress.