Welcome to “Introduction to Analytics
and Business Intelligence Tools.” After watching this video, you will be able to: Define analytics. Describe how business intelligence tools have
changed analytics processing and results. Outline the purpose of Analytics
and Business Intelligence tools. Define what an Analytics or
Business Intelligence tool is, and Identify several Analytics and
Business Intelligence tools. Analytics is the systematic compilation
and dissection of data, statistics, and operations research to build
models to make better decisions. Compute storage, processors, and
memory capabilities have significantly increased speed, capacity, and affordability. The data warehousing solutions available now
store large volumes of data with low latency. These exponential increases in both capacity
and speed for storage, processors, and memory enable organizations to now process petaflops
of data with swift turnaround times. When more data is available,
analytics are more accurate. Organizations can use BI tools’ built-in
expertise to analyze data and find patterns using machine learning based
on statistical modeling. Today’s analytical tools have
reduced the time to churn data so much that results are now almost real-time. These analytical outcomes can be
descriptive, prescriptive, or predictive. Descriptive analytics
provide insight into the past. Predictive analytics provide insight
into what could happen in the future. In contrast, prescriptive analytics
provide insight into what actions an organization should take to create
a specific outcome in the future. Business intelligence tools, or BI
tools, enable data preparation, data mining, data management, and data visualization. Implementing BI tools is much
like solving a puzzle to gain a more comprehensive picture of your organization. BI tools help organizations
focus on the what and the why. Businesses use their data to
discover what is happening and determine what triggered a specific outcome. BI tools, as highly evolved
software, apply statistics and operations research as part of the
process of creating inherent intelligence. BI tools also help organizations harness
the power of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics
for operational and strategic decisions. Users can analyze business operations through
dashboarding, reporting, and self-serve analytics based on historical, current, and projected data
to transform data into business opportunities. There are many solutions available
in the market that empower organizations with the ability
to perform advanced analytics. Some of the well-known players in the market are, IBM Cognos Analytics, which integrates Watson
Analytics that leverages IBM’s artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Microsoft Power BI, well
known for its secure insights, Tableau is known for powerful visualizations, Oracle Analytics cloud known for
its conversational analytics, SAP Business Objects known for
its intelligent analytics, and Tibco Spotfire offers scalability for
small and large organizations. IBM has invested more than 25 billion dollars
since 2005 to grow its analytics business. Cognos Analytics is IBM’s AI-fuelled
business intelligence and analytics software that supports the entire data analytics
lifecycle, from discovery to operations. In this video, you learned that: Analytics is building models with
data to make better decisions. Business Intelligence is a technology
that enables data preparation, data mining, data management,
and data visualization. The software market offers many
business intelligence tools and IBM Cognos Analytics is one of the
top BI solutions available based on AI.