Data analytics, big data, machine learning, data science, AI, automation, business analytics.
There are a lot of terms that get thrown around when it comes to data and some of them are
so new that everybody doesn t even agree what they mean.
What is data analytics and how does it relate to all of these other things that I just touched
on?
I m Jen, I m an experienced data analyst and today I m answering the question, what is
data analytics?
Data analytics has experienced a huge surge in the past decade.
Thanks to the boom in technology, our data is increasing exponentially.
In 2005, we created .1 zettabytes of data.
In 2010 we created two zettabytes.
By 2015 that jumped to 12 zettabytes that we were creating annually and by 2020 we re
expected to be creating 47 zettabytes of data every year and its just going to continue
to grow from there.
You can see why big data is becoming a popular term to use.
We re creating massive amounts of data on a scale that we have difficult even understanding.
Big Data means high velocity, high volume and high variety.
We ve got internal data, external data, we have structured data from sales information
and we have unstructured data from search engines and forum discussions.
This already big data continues to escalate as we scramble to make sense out of it.
This is where data analytics comes in.
Data Analytics looks at or analyses data to create structure order and meaning out of
it.
Data Analytics is generally divided into three areas.
Descriptive analytics tell us what happened in the past, but they don t tell us anything
about why it happened.
Predictive analytics use this knowledge of the path that we got from descriptive analytics
to tell us what s going to happen in the future.
Prescriptive analytics take it one step further to tell us the best most efficient way to
operate our companies, staff our organization and sell our products.
Business intelligence blends data analytics along with insights to allow us to make informed
decisions.
Its not so much about the informed decision, it s creating the data and information to
allow the opportunity to create that informed decision.
The decision stage is really happening more in business analytics where we re blending
the data and the knowledge about the organization that business intelligence and actually making
the business decision.
Business analytics is often connected more with management or management teams because
it is so focused on the decision-making part of the process.
You ve probably noticed a lot of connection between all of these areas because they are
really integrated with each.
Data scientists and data analysts are the people leveraging this information to distil
insights out of all the data.
They leverage math programming and data visualization skills to make sense out of the data and then
share these learnings with the rest of the organization to allow the decisions that need
to be made to take place.
That s what data analytics is.
Thanks so much for watching.