Introduction to Big Data Analytics - Data Science and Big Data Analytics - page 15

1.2 State of the Practice in Analytics

Current business problems provide many opportunities for organizations to become
more analytical and data driven, as shown in Table 1.2 .

Table 1.2 Business Drivers for Advanced Analytics

Business Driver Examples
Optimize business operations Sales, pricing, profitability, efficiency
Identify business risk Customer churn, fraud, default

Predict new business
opportunities

Upsell, cross-sell, best new customer prospects

Comply with laws or
regulatory requirements

Anti-Money Laundering, Fair Lending, Basel
II-III, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Table 1.2 outlines four categories of common business problems that organizations
contend with where they have an opportunity to leverage advanced analytics to
create competitive advantage. Rather than only performing standard reporting on
these areas, organizations can apply advanced analytical techniques to optimize
processes and derive more value from these common tasks. The first three examples
do not represent new problems. Organizations have been trying to reduce customer
churn, increase sales, and cross-sell customers for many years. What is new is
the opportunity to fuse advanced analytical techniques with Big Data to produce
more impactful analyses for these traditional problems. The last example portrays
emerging regulatory requirements. Many compliance and regulatory laws have been
in existence for decades, but additional requirements are added every year, which
represent additional complexity and data requirements for organizations. Laws
related to anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud prevention require advanced
analytical techniques to comply with and manage properly.

1.2.1 BI Versus Data Science

The four business drivers shown in Table 1.2 require a variety of analytical
techniques to address them properly. Although much is written generally about
analytics, it is important to distinguish between BI and Data Science. As shown in
Figure 1.8 , there are several ways to compare these groups of analytical techniques.