The intensified used of data based on analytical models to control digitalized operational business processes in an intelligent way is a game changer that continuously disrupts more and more markets. This book exemplifies this development and shows the latest tools and advances in this field Business Analytics for Managers offers real-world guidance for organizations looking to leverage their data into a competitive advantage. This new second edition covers the advances that have revolutionized the field since the first edition's release; big data and real-time digitalized decision making have become major components of any analytics strategy, and new technologies are allowing businesses to gain even more insight from the ever-increasing influx of data. New terms, theories, and technologies are explained and discussed in terms of practical benefit, and the emphasis on forward thinking over historical data describes how analytics can drive better business planning. Coverage includes data warehousing, big data, social media, security, cloud technologies, and future trends, with expert insight on the practical aspects of the current state of the field. Analytics helps businesses move forward. Extensive use of statistical and quantitative analysis alongside explanatory and predictive modeling facilitates fact-based decision making, and evolving technologies continue to streamline every step of the process. This book provides an essential update, and describes how today's tools make business analytics more valuable than ever. Learn how Hadoop can upgrade your data processing and storage Discover the many uses for social media data in analysis and communication Get up to speed on the latest in cloud technologies, data security, and more Prepare for emerging technologies and the future of business analytics Most businesses are caught in a massive, non-stop stream of data. It can become one of your most valuable assets, or a never-ending flood of missed opportunity. Technology moves fast, and keeping up with the cutting edge is crucial for wringing even more value from your data— Business Analytics for Managers brings you up to date, and shows you what analytics can do for you now.

Resolve data-heavy retail marketing questions through key analytic steps, with expert guidance in a direct and conceptual style.

The Data and Analytics Playbook: Proven Methods for Governed Data and Analytic Quality explores the way in which data continues to dominate budgets, along with the varying efforts made across a variety of business enablement projects, including applications, web and mobile computing, big data analytics, and traditional data integration. The book teaches readers how to use proven methods and accelerators to break through data obstacles to provide faster, higher quality delivery of mission critical programs. Drawing upon years of practical experience, and using numerous examples and an easy to understand playbook, Lowell Fryman, Gregory Lampshire, and Dan Meers discuss a simple, proven approach to the execution of multiple data oriented activities. In addition, they present a clear set of methods to provide reliable governance, controls, risk, and exposure management for enterprise data and the programs that rely upon it. In addition, they discuss a cost-effective approach to providing sustainable governance and quality outcomes that enhance project delivery, while also ensuring ongoing controls. Example activities, templates, outputs, resources, and roles are explored, along with different organizational models in common use today and the ways they can be mapped to leverage playbook data governance throughout the organization. Provides a mature and proven playbook approach (methodology) to enabling data governance that supports agile implementation Features specific examples of current industry challenges in enterprise risk management, including anti-money laundering and fraud prevention Describes business benefit measures and funding approaches using exposure based cost models that augment risk models for cost avoidance analysis and accelerated delivery approaches using data integration sprints for application, integration, and information delivery success

Get started quickly with Microsoft Power BI! Experts Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo will help you bring your data to life, transforming your company’s data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize, allowing you to focus on what matters most to you. Stay in the know, spot trends as they happen, and push your business to new limits. This free ebook introduces Microsoft Power BI basics through a practical, scenario-based guided tour of the tool, showing you how to build analytical solutions using Power BI. Read the ebook to get an overview of Power BI, or dig deeper and follow along on your PC using the book’s examples. Introducing Microsoft Power BI enables you to evaluate when and how to use Power BI. Get inspired to improve business processes in your company by leveraging the available analytical and collaborative features of this environment. Be sure to watch for the publication of Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo’s upcoming retail book, Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel (ISBN 9781509302765). Go to the book’s page at the Microsoft Press Store here for more details: http://aka.ms/analyzingdata/details. Learn more about Power BI at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/. .

With the increasing barrage of big data, it becomes vital for organizations to make sense of this data in a timely and effective way to improve their decision making and competitive advantage. That's where business analytics come into play. This book explores case studies from industry leaders in big data domains such as cybersecurity, marketing, finance, emergency management, healthcare, and transportation. It offers a concise guide for CEOs and senior managers, as well as for business, management, and technology students interested in this emerging field.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO USING ANALYTICS TO MANAGE RISK AND UNCERTAINTY IN COMPLEX GLOBAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS Practical techniques for developing reliable, actionable intelligence–and using it to craft strategy Analytical opportunities to solve key managerial problems in global enterprises Written for working managers: packed with realistic, useful examples This guide helps global managers use modern analytics to gain reliable, actionable, and timely business intelligence–and use it to manage risk, build winning strategies, and solve urgent problems. Dr. Hokey Min offers a practical, easy-to-understand overview of business analytics in a global context, focusing especially on managerial and strategic implications. After demystifying today’s core quantitative tools, he demonstrates them at work in a wide spectrum of global applications. You’ll build models to help segment global markets, forecast demand, assess risk, plan financing, optimize supply chains, and more. Along the way, you’ll find practical guidance for developing analytic thinking, operationalizing Big Data in global environments, and preparing for future analytical innovations. Whether you’re a global executive, strategist, analyst, marketer, supply chain professional, student or researcher, this book will help you drive real value from analytics–in smarter decisions, improved strategy, and better management. In today’s global business environments characterized by growing complexity, volatility, and uncertainty, business analytics has become an indispensable tool for managing these challenges. Specifically, global managers need analytics expertise to solve problems, identify opportunities, shape strategy, mitigate risk, and improve their day-to-day operational efficiency. Now, for the first time, there’s an analytics guide designed specifically for decision-makers in global organizations. Leveraging his experience teaching a number of students and training hundreds of managers and executives, Dr. Hokey Min demystifies the principles and tools of modern business analytics, and demonstrates their real-world use in global business. First, Dr. Min identifies key success factors and mindsets, helping you establish the preconditions for effective analysis. Next, he walks you through the practicalities of collecting, organizing, and analyzing Big Data, and developing models to transform them into actionable insight. Building on these foundations, he illustrates core analytical applications in finance, healthcare, and global supply chains. He concludes by previewing emerging trends in analytics, including the newest tools for automated decision-making. Compare today’s key quantitative tools Stats, data mining, OR, and simulation: how they work, when to use them Get the right data… …and get the data right Predict the future… …and sense its arrival sooner than others can Implement high-value analytics applications… …in finance, supply chains, healthcare, and beyond

Systems Analysis and Synthesis: Bridging Computer Science and Information Technology presents several new graph-theoretical methods that relate system design to core computer science concepts, and enable correct systems to be synthesized from specifications. Based on material refined in the author’s university courses, the book has immediate applicability for working system engineers or recent graduates who understand computer technology, but have the unfamiliar task of applying their knowledge to a real business problem. Starting with a comparison of synthesis and analysis, the book explains the fundamental building blocks of systems-atoms and events-and takes a graph-theoretical approach to database design to encourage a well-designed schema. The author explains how database systems work-useful both when working with a commercial database management system and when hand-crafting data structures-and how events control the way data flows through a system. Later chapters deal with system dynamics and modelling, rule-based systems, user psychology, and project management, to round out readers’ ability to understand and solve business problems. Bridges computer science theory with practical business problems to lead readers from requirements to a working system without error or backtracking Explains use-definition analysis to derive process graphs and avoid large-scale designs that don’t quite work Demonstrates functional dependency graphs to allow databases to be designed without painful iteration Includes chapters on system dynamics and modeling, rule-based systems, user psychology, and project management

Enhancing Enterprise Intelligence: Leveraging ERP, CRM, SCM, PLM, BPM, and BI takes a fresh look at the benefits of enterprise systems (ES), focusing on the fact that ES collectively contribute to enhancing the intelligence quotient of an enterprise. The book provides an overview of the characteristics and essential strengths of various categories of ES, namely, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply-Chain Management (SCM), Product LifeCycle Management (PLM), Business Process Management (BPM), and Business Intelligence (BI).

Key Business Analytics will help managers apply tools to turn data into insights that help them better understand their customers, optimise their internal processes and identify cost savings and growth opportunities.

Capitalise on big data to add value to your small business Written by bestselling author and big data expert Bernard Marr, Big Data For Small Business For Dummies helps you understand what big data actually is—and how you can analyse and use it to improve your business. Free of confusing jargon and complemented with lots of step-by-step guidance and helpful advice, it quickly and painlessly helps you get the most from using big data in a small business. Business data has been around for a long time. Unfortunately, it was trapped away in overcrowded filing cabinets and on archaic floppy disks. Now, thanks to technology and new tools that display complex databases in a much simpler manner, small businesses can benefit from the big data that's been hiding right under their noses. With the help of this friendly guide, you'll discover how to get your hands on big data to develop new offerings, products and services; understand technological change; create an infrastructure; develop strategies; and make smarter business decisions. Shows you how to use big data to make sense of user activity on social networks and customer transactions Demonstrates how to capture, store, search, share, analyse and visualise analytics Helps you turn your data into actionable insights Explains how to use big data to your advantage in order to transform your small business If you're a small business owner or employee, Big Data For Small Business For Dummies helps you harness the hottest commodity on the market today in order to take your company to new heights.

Integrate big data into business to drive competitive advantage and sustainable success Big Data MBA brings insight and expertise to leveraging big data in business so you can harness the power of analytics and gain a true business advantage. Based on a practical framework with supporting methodology and hands-on exercises, this book helps identify where and how big data can help you transform your business. You'll learn how to exploit new sources of customer, product, and operational data, coupled with advanced analytics and data science, to optimize key processes, uncover monetization opportunities, and create new sources of competitive differentiation. The discussion includes guidelines for operationalizing analytics, optimal organizational structure, and using analytic insights throughout your organization's user experience to customers and front-end employees alike. You'll learn to “think like a data scientist” as you build upon the decisions your business is trying to make, the hypotheses you need to test, and the predictions you need to produce. Business stakeholders no longer need to relinquish control of data and analytics to IT. In fact, they must champion the organization's data collection and analysis efforts. This book is a primer on the business approach to analytics, providing the practical understanding you need to convert data into opportunity. Understand where and how to leverage big data Integrate analytics into everyday operations Structure your organization to drive analytic insights Optimize processes, uncover opportunities, and stand out from the rest Help business stakeholders to “think like a data scientist” Understand appropriate business application of different analytic techniques If you want data to transform your business, you need to know how to put it to use. Big Data MBA shows you how to implement big data and analytics to make better decisions.

This book covers the practical aspects of database design, data cleansing, data analysis, and data protection , among others. The focus is on what you really need to know to create the right database for your small business and to leverage it most effectively to spur growth and revenue. Databases for Small Business is a practical handbook for entrepreneurs, managers, staff, and professionals in small organizations who are not IT specialists but who recognize the need to ramp up their small organizations’ use of data and to round out their own business expertise and office skills with basic database proficiency. Anna Manning—a data scientist who has worked on database design and data analysis in a computer science university research lab, her own small business, and a nonprofit—walks you through the progression of steps that will enable you to extract actionable intelligence and maximum value from your business data in terms of marketing, sales, customer relations, decision making, and business strategy. Dr. Manning illustrates the steps in the book with four running case studies of a small online business, an engineering startup, a small legal firm, and a nonprofit organization.

More than ever, data drives decisions in organizations—and we have more data, and more ways to analyze it, than ever. Yet strategic initiatives continue to fail as often as they did when computers ran on punch cards. Economist and research scientist Alec Levenson says we need a new approach. The problem, Levenson says, is that the business people who devise the strategies and the human resources people who get employees to implement them use completely different analytics. Business analytics can determine if operational priorities aren't being achieved but can't explain why. HR analytics reveal potentially helpful policy and process improvements but can't identify which would have the greatest strategic impact. This book shows how to use an integrated approach to bring these two pieces together. Levenson presents a thorough and realistic treatment of the reasons for and challenges of taking an integrated approach. He provides details on the different parts of both enterprise and human capital analytics that have to be conducted for integration to be successful and includes specific questions to ask, along with examples of applying integrated analytics to address particular organizational challenges. Effective analytics is a team sport. Levenson's approach allows you to get the deepest insights by bringing people together from both the business and HR perspectives to assess what's going on and determine the right solution.

In Beginning Big Data with Power BI and Excel 2013, you will learn to solve business problems by tapping the power of Microsoft’s Excel and Power BI to import data from NoSQL and SQL databases and other sources, create relational data models, and analyze business problems through sophisticated dashboards and data-driven maps. While Beginning Big Data with Power BI and Excel 2013 covers prominent tools such as Hadoop and the NoSQL databases, it recognizes that most small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the Big Data processing needs of a Netflix, Target, or Facebook. Instead, it shows how to import data and use the self-service analytics available in Excel with Power BI. As you’ll see through the book’s numerous case examples, these tools—which you already know how to use—can perform many of the same functions as the higher-end Apache tools many people believe are required to carry out in Big Data projects. Through instruction, insight, advice, and case studies, Beginning Big Data with Power BI and Excel 2013 will show you how to: Import and mash up data from web pages, SQL and NoSQL databases, the Azure Marketplace and other sources. Tap into the analytical power of PivotTables and PivotCharts and develop relational data models to track trends and make predictions based on a wide range of data. Understand basic statistics and use Excel with PowerBI to do sophisticated statistical analysis—including identifying trends and correlations. Use SQL within Excel to do sophisticated queries across multiple tables, including NoSQL databases. Create complex formulas to solve real-world business problems using Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).

Compared to the speed and convenience of major web search engines, most business intelligence (BI) products are slow, stiff, and unresponsive. Business leaders today often wait days or weeks to get BI reports on inquiries about customers, products, or markets. But the latest BI products show that a significant change is taking place—a change led by search. This O’Reilly report examines three recent products with intelligent search capabilities: the ThoughtSpot Analytical Search Appliance, Microsoft’s Power BI service, and an offering from Adatao. You’ll learn how these products can provide you with answers and visualizations as quickly as questions come to mind. You’ll investigate: The convergence of BI and search What a search-driven user experience looks like The intelligence required for analytical search Data sources and their associated data modeling requirements Turning on-the-fly calculations into visualizations Applying enterprise scale and security to search

Apply the tools and techniques of text analytics with ease and add value to your company by understanding its key approaches and the business reality behind them.

"Learning SAP Business Objects Dashboards" is your definitive guide to mastering the creation of professional, interactive dashboards tailored for both desktop and mobile use. Whether you are starting with basics or looking to enhance your existing BI skill set, this book offers step-by-step guidance to build customizing and visually appealing dashboards using SAP Business Objects. What this Book will help me do Gain proficiency in using SAP BO Dashboard Designer to create compelling BI dashboards. Learn how to integrate data seamlessly into SAP dashboards for dynamic insights. Master the art of building interactive and responsive dashboards suitable for various devices. Explore advanced visualization techniques including maps, selectors, and styling. Understand how to ensure data security and successfully deploy your dashboards. Author(s) Taha Mahmoud is an experienced Business Intelligence consultant specializing in SAP technologies. With years of experience in crafting custom BI solutions, Taha brings a practical and approachable teaching style to the complex realm of dashboard design. His goal in writing this book is to impart practical skills to learners so they can confidently excel in their BI careers. Who is it for? This book is ideal for business analysts, BI developers, and data visualization enthusiasts aiming to learn or improve their SAP Business Objects dashboard skills. It requires basic knowledge of MS Excel and an analytical mindset. If you're tasked with presenting data in clear, impactful visuals or making interactive dashboards for your organization, this book is for you.

Here's the net takeaway: Businesses want insights from data they can translate into meaningful actions and real results. Software vendors are beginning to deliver a new generation of advanced analytics packages that address business issues directly. In this O'Reilly report, Mike Barlow reveals how this new user-friendly software is helping businesses go beyond data analysis and straight to decision-making—without requiring data science expertise or truckloads of cash. How has advanced analytics progressed from lab project to commercial product so quickly? Through interviews with data analysts, you'll understand the role that machine learning plays in specialized analytics packages, and how this software alone can make decisions based on what's likely to happen next. When you have these capabilities, you’ve reached "the last mile of analytics."

Social Data Analytics is the first practical guide for professionals who want to employ social data for analytics and business intelligence (BI). This book provides a comprehensive overview of the technologies and platforms and shows you how to access and analyze the data. You'll explore the five major types of social data and learn from cases and platform examples to help you make the most of sentiment, behavioral, social graph, location, and rich media data. A four-step approach to the social BI process will help you access, evaluate, collaborate, and share social data with ease. You'll learn everything you need to know to monitor social media and get an overview of the leading vendors in a crowded space of BI applications. By the end of this book, you will be well prepared for your organization’s next social data analytics project. Provides foundational understanding of new and emerging technologies—social data, collaboration, big data, advanced analytics Includes case studies and practical examples of success and failures Will prepare you to lead projects and advance initiatives that will benefit you and your organization

Learn everything you need to know to start using business analytics and integrating it throughout your organization. brings together a complete, integrated package of knowledge for newcomers to the subject. The authors present an up-to-date view of what business analytics is, why it is so valuable, and most importantly, how it is used. They combine essential conceptual content with clear explanations of the tools, techniques, and methodologies actually used to implement modern business analytics initiatives. Business Analytics Principles, Concepts, and Applications with SAS They offer a proven step-wise approach to designing an analytics program, and successfully integrating it into your organization, so it effectively provides intelligence for competitive advantage in decision making. Using step-by-step examples, the authors identify common challenges that can be addressed by business analytics, illustrate each type of analytics (descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive), and guide users in undertaking their own projects. Illustrating the real-world use of statistical, information systems, and management science methodologies, these examples help readers successfully apply the methods they are learning. Unlike most competitive guides, this text demonstrates the use of SAS software, permitting instructors to spend less time teaching software and more time focusing on business analytics itself. will be a valuable resource for all beginning-to-intermediate level business analysts and business analytics managers; for MBA/Masters' degree students in the field; and for advanced undergraduates majoring in statistics, applied mathematics, or engineering/operations research. Business Analytics Principles, Concepts, and Applications with SAS