CRM Consulting and Data Analysis
Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein, Physicist
While data is important, the right data is essential. It’s becoming easier to feel overwhelmed by the increasing amounts of data being collected. Understanding what’s important to the business (you need clear business goals) helps analysts to evaluate what data counts or should be counted. Albert Einstein was on to something when he said we can’t always track what we want to count, but that doesn’t stop us from constantly exploring new ways to get the data we need (just remember to respect privacy policies and laws).
Data or information is in raw format. With increasing data size, it has become a need for inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of finding useful information, making conclusions, and supporting decision making. This process is known as data analysis.
Data mining is a particular data analysis technique where modeling and knowledge discovery for predictive rather than purely descriptive purposes is focused. Business intelligence covers data analysis that relies heavily on aggregation, focusing on business information. In statistical applications, some people divide business analytics into descriptive statistics, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and confirmatory data analysis (CDA).
EDA focuses on discovering new features in the data and CDA focuses on confirming or falsifying existing hypotheses. Predictive analytics does forecasting or classification by focusing on statistical or structural models while in text analytics, statistical, linguistic and structural techniques are applied to extract and classify information from textual sources, a species of unstructured data. All are varieties of data analysis.
So, the Data wave has changed the ways in which industries function. With Big Data has emerged the requirement to implement advanced analytics to it. Now experts can make more accurate and profitable decisions.