Analytics is used as both an umbrella term to describe the overall market and a technical term to describe particular technologies. As an umbrella term, analytics replaces “decision support”, “business intelligence”, and “performance management” which once held the same meaning.
1. Umbrella definition: The people, processes, and technologies that turn data into insights and drive business decisions and actions.
2. Technical definition. The technologies and techniques that businesspeople use to analyze data. It spans everything from dashboards to visual analysis tools to statistics and machine learning.
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Analytics as an umbrella term describes the people, processes, and technologies that turn data into insights and drive business decisions and actions. Interestingly, I used the same definition to describe data warehousing in 1995, business intelligence in 2000, and performance management in 2005. Although the terms have changed as the technology has advanced, our basic objective has remained the same for the past 20 years: use data to make smarter decisions. Analytics as a technical term describes the technologies and techniques that businesspeople use to analyze data. Analytics technology is a big tent. It spans everything from dashboards to visual analysis tools to statistics and machine learning. There are two major categories of analytics tools: Reporting tools, which includes dashboards and scorecards, enable users to monitor key metrics and get answers to predefined questions. Analysis tools, on the other hand, enable users to explore data in an ad hoc fashion and discover trends, anomalies, and patterns. Generally speaking, business users use reporting tools to monitor data and analysis tools to explore it.
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