Modelling & Analytics have started creating significant impact in the business performance and ‘Analytics’ has become the mantra in the organisations. But why is Analytics gaining such huge importance in the organisations - Reasons are simple.

#1: So far companies were focusing on the improvement of ‘operational/manufacturing/supply chain’… efficiencies – but after reaching a certain point the ROI on the improvement of these things would be diminishing. So unless companies try new avenues of improving the efficiencies, they can’t create that difference. Here comes Analytics to help the companies in improving the top-line growth, optimizing spends, efficiently delivering what consumers want…etc

#2: With the huge impact created by the IT systems, each and every company is sitting on large chunk of data. Most of them do not know what to do, except plotting them on the graph and see visual correlations…

Here comes Analytics to help the organisations, to make the ‘real difference’, to provide insights and understanding, thereby the management can take informed decisions topped by confident actions.

As I mentioned, Business analytics is going to be the next major break-through step in the ever changing Business Intelligence domain. This I call as ‘Intelligent Business Analytics’ stage. The reason for pre-fixing the word ‘Intelligent’ is not to prove how efficiently the information is acquired, but how efficiently it is used and analysed.

Now the Million dollar question: How do you distinguish business analytics from business intelligence?

If Analytics is the science and art of analysis – like presenting data, numbers and doing statistical analysis; Business analytics goes well beyond – and it tries to apply the logic and mental thought processes to find meaningful implications in data.

This is the mental thought process that helps organisations in building capabilities that define intelligence – reasoning capabilities, predictions, solve business problems, innovate and learn.

Hence, in my view, business analytics is an interesting magical and powerful thing – but also very large and complex.

(Reason for this post: Most of my work involves Business Analytics and just penning few thoughts on the future of Analytics)

Recently I read the much hyped book, “It Happened in India”. Personally I didn’t like this book as most of the points claimed as the success factors in the book are attributed to ‘fooled by randomness’. But that’s just my opinion.

However, my biggest take away from the book came in the first 50 pages. It is the GFE Factor. Now coming to the point: What is this GFE Factor.. It is Greed – Fear – Envy.

The purchasing behaviour (irrational) of any consumer is linked to one of these three attributes.

• You purchase something because it is being offered for a price cheaper than the market (Greed).
• You purchase something because it is being sold for a price less than the market, tomorrow it might not (Fear).
• You purchase something that you don’t need, because your neighbour has bought it for a cheap price.

So whether it’s Greed, Fear or Envy – you bought something.

Extending this logic beyond purchasing behaviour…. I believe this is the subtle factor that is driving people’s behaviour in life. Most of the human motivations/aspirations are bound to evolve from one of these factors.

I know…. People won’t accept this logic as every one tries to fit their motivations or aspirations into the rational set of framework. But beyond those frameworks, there will definitely be an irrational element. I am not trying to say that this GFE factor is bad, but I am just trying to give a thought to this irrational framework.

Let me know the views and counter views on this… :-)