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Current Business and Technology Conditions That Complicate Effective Application of Business Analytics to Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management Data, and the Prospects for Improvement

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Current business and technology conditions that complicate effective application of business analytics to business intelligence and knowledge management data, and the prospects for improvement

Businesses have collected data for many years. Most of the data they collect has been for historical purposes, such as how much of an item has sold and what are the profits gained from those sales. Business intelligence allows one to take that data, manipulate as you see fit and generate reports. The data then has to be extracted and trends analyzed so that businesses can find more opportunities and new customer segments. This is known as business analytics. However that may sound simple, there are current business and technology conditions …show more content…

Scott Staple (2009) claims that the culprit for this is the term "business intelligence" due to how companies are using it to develop their tools. The software companies are basically telling businesses that the software tools they have created will automatically gather intelligence to run their business. However, these tools are very good for things like reporting, data mining, creating dashboards, etc., this is still all data and not information. This is because business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning.

Business analytics on the other hand, as defined on Wikipedia (2012, Aug 06) "refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning." It goes on to state that, "Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods." This is in contrast to business intelligence and stated above. Business intelligence answers questions such as what happened, , how often, how many, where the problem is, and what needs to happen next. Business analytics answers questions like why is this happening, what if these trends continue, what might

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