What is Business Intelligence?

Should you pursue a career in BI/Analytics? “By 2018, the United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions …” McKinsey Global Institute, 2011

What do I need to know to be good at it? Is analytics for you? What is “analytics”? What do I need to know to be good at it? Do I even like it?

What is analytics? A broad term used to explain: What happened (descriptive); What will happen (predictive); and What should happen (prescriptive)

Descriptive Analytics What happened? Reports Dashboards Scorecards Who won?

Predictive Analytics What will happen? Regression (method) Fraud detection (application)

Prescriptive Analytics What should happen? Uses descriptive, predictive, and mathematical modeling to dynamically optimize a certain outcome “The objective of prescriptive analytics is not only to predict future outcomes, but also to make recommendations based on those outcomes” Mark van Rijmenam http://data-informed.com/future-big-data-prescriptive-analytics-changes-game/

What do I need to know to be good at analytics? “To be proficient with analytics, you must be an analytical thinker and enjoy problem solving.” (Watson, 2015:6)

Where do you fit in?

Where do you fit in? What do you need to know? User How to use descriptive analytics tools and applications & how data is stored in databases User

Where do you fit in? What do you need to know? Analyst How to use predictive analytics tools and applications to understand business conditions and drive business processes Analyst

Where do you fit in? Data scientist

The three pillars of analytics

Conclusion Many great careers in BI/Analytics, but not for everyone—“Is it for you?” A piece of advise: Think about it!!! You do not need to decide right now … To be successful, you will need analytic aptitude, the right training, and hard study The harder it gets as you move from user to analyst to data scientist If you want a career in analytics, take courses in statistics, database (already did!), python, business intelligence (current taking), and analytics!