The document discusses business analytics and how to approach business analytics projects. It defines business analytics as extracting useful knowledge from data to solve business problems using techniques such as statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and data visualization. It lists common business analytics tasks such as customer segmentation, demand forecasting, and fraud detection. The document provides guidance on how to approach business analytics, including starting with a business problem, understanding available data, and identifying an analytics strategy, rather than just analyzing data for the sake of it. It also warns of common pitfalls like getting stuck in the analysis and not having clear exit criteria.

1. © 2014 NUS. All rights reserved.
Dr. Barry Shepherd
Senior Member, Business Analytics Practice
Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore
barryshepherd@nus.edu.sg
Business Analytics Practice
How do we “do” Business Analytics?

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What is Business Analytics?
The process of extracting useful
knowledge from data to solve
business problems

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What is Business Analytics?

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What is Business Analytics?
• Statistical Analysis
• Predictive Modeling
• Association Finding
• Link analysis
• Data Visualisation
• Graph/Network Analysis
• Sequence Finding
• Data Clustering
• Outlier Detection
• Text Mining
• Many more….
• Customer Segmentation & Profiling
• Customer Acquisition & Retention
• Campaign & Promotion Analysis
• Measure Sales Force Effectiveness
• Spend Analysis
• Market Basket Analysis
• Demand Forecasting
• Warehouse Planning
• Inventory Management
• Logistics Optimisation
• Healthcare Management &
Optimisation
• Analysis of Clinical trials
• Fraud Detection
• Market & Credit Risk Analysis
• Many more….
The process of using
techniques such as….
To perform tasks
such as….
In domains
such as…

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How do we “do” Business Analytics?
• I have lots of data, it must be useful, go find me some insights
• Let’s build a big data warehouse then see what we can do with it
• We have just bought XYX tool/algorithm, go use it
Start with a business
problem!
Understand what data is
available, needed, could
be useful
Identify an analytics
approach/strategy
X
X

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Business Analytics Practice

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Discovery: Find me some Insights!
What is an insight?

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Finding Insights
• Insights must be useful
and actionable
• Insights often happen
when you are looking for
something else

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Finding Insights
10
Starting
Hypothesis &
Questions
Verify, Evaluate, Test,
Explore, Visualise
New avenues to explore,
Serendipitous insights
• Where do you think your
inefficiencies are?
• What feedback are you getting
from customers?
• Is the Pareto principle at work?
(the 80/20 rule)
• What caused the anomalies,
outliers?
New/Amended
Hypothesis
Start with some hypotheses, questions to answer…..

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Business Analytics Pitfalls
• Remember to get off!
• Have a clear exit criterion
• Avoid perfectionism
• Do a quick first-cut
solution as a ball-park
measure of success

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Business Analytics Pitfalls
• What data do you have?
• What data do you need?
• What data could be useful?
Success is more often
achieved by getting
better data rather than
tweaking an algorithm
12

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Institute of Systems Science,
National University of Singapore
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