BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Business analytics (BA) is the practice of iterative, methodical exploration of an organization’s data with emphasis on statistical analysis. Business analytics is used by companies committed to data-driven decision making.
BA is used to gain insights that inform business decisions and can be used to automate and optimize business processes. Data-driven companies treat their data as a corporate asset and leverage it for competitive advantage. Successful business analytics depends on data quality, skilled analysts who understand the technologies and the business and an organizational commitment to data-driven decision making.
Examples of BA uses include: * Exploring data to find new patterns and relationships (data mining) * Explaining why a certain result occurred (statistical analysis, quantitative analysis) * Experimenting to test previous decisions (A/B testing, multivariate testing) * Forecasting future results (predictive modeling, predictive analytics) *
FUNCTIONS OF A BUSINESS ANALYST
At a high level, a Business Analyst acts as a liaison between business people who have business problems and technology people who know how to create automated solutions. A Business Analyst serves the mission-critical function of understanding specific business needs, determining and documenting accurate requirements from business units and presenting those requirements in a manner that is agreeable, measurable and flexible enough to meet project and stakeholder needs. The Business Analyst is an integral member of a project team who must possess a collection of essential people and technical skills to be successful.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF BUSINESS ANALYSTICS
A true Business Analyst is responsible for effectively and efficiently:

* Defining and scoping a project; * Gathering requirements from business units; * Documenting business and technical requirements accurately; * Communicating requirements to sponsors, stakeholders and project team members; * Verifying that the implemented solution meets the requirements; * Testing the solution to validate project objectives.

ROLE OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS IN MOBILE PHONE RETAILER , BEST BUY
Mobile phone retailer, Best Buy Europe, has reduced the time staff take to produce critical business reports from days to hours, after investing in a business analytics platform.
The company, a joint venture between Best Buy and Carphone Warehouse, claims the system, Insight Analytics, has paid for itself in 12 months.
Best Buy took the decision to replace SAP's Business Objects platform with Insight Analytics two years ago. The move replaced a large number of spreadsheets used through the organisation with a single dataset.
"We wanted a single version of the truth," said Nick Boxall, MIS manager for global business services at Best Buy Europe. "Just about everybody was producing reports. It was a massive cottage industry, and it was difficult to know which data was the right version of the truth."
Best Buy installed Insight Analytics - which forms part of the company's Planview Enterprise portfolio management platform - in its project management office (PMO) to manage and monitor its project and IT work.
"We now get better compliance with data going into the system. Every project has a title, an owner and a go-live date. If data is incorrect, it shows up in a colourful bar chart and we can correct it," said Boxall.
The system produces reports automatically and creates graphics directly in PowerPoint presentations and other applications.
Integrating Insight Analytics into Best Buy's existing Planview Enterprise project portfolio management platform presented technical challenges, said Boxall.
"We are on an Oracle SQL database for PlanView, but we don't have many SQL people. We were reliant on Planview to do some SQL work," he said. "Planview produces something very generic, out of the box. They had to do a lot of bespoking to get it right for our needs."
The company plans to move to the latest version of Planview Enterprise. The upgrade will allow Best Buy staff to access Insight Analytics through Microsoft Sharepoint.
METHODS OF ANALYSIS IN BUSINESS DECISION * Descriptive Analytics:
Gain insight from historical data with reporting, scorecards, clustering etc. * Predictive analytics predictive modeling using statistical and machine learning techniques. * Prescriptive analytics: recommend decisions using optimization, simulation etc. These methods help in business decision making.
Business Analytics Framework
You have data everywhere. You have business problems that you know you could solve with that data. But you don’t know where to start. The beauty of a framework is that it helps you focus. It encourages you to find the most pressing – yet fixable – problems, solve them first and build from there.

Once you’ve used SAS to solve your most critical problems, you can build on that success and add more functionality over time. As new capabilities are added, your benefits continue to multiply and your total cost of ownership is reduced.

Data Integration
Always access and process the data you need. Improve data integrity at the source with automatic processes that consolidate, cleanse and standardize your data directly in your operational environments. Offer a collaborative environment with a common set of tools that promote the reuse and sharing of data to achieve faster results and lower costs. Deliver consistent, trusted and verifiable information across systems.

Analytics
Give decision makers a range of techniques to collect, classify, analyze and interpret data for business insight. Provide an added level of specificity to the decision-making process to address problems with greater precision and confidence. Instead of just analyzing historic information and using gut instinct, make accurate predictions to gain advantage, lower risk and plan for the future.

Reporting
The way you present analyses and provide access to hands-on reporting tools can be just as important as the reported results themselves. Help everyone in your organization make the best decisions by giving nontechnical users: * Access to the right data. * Tools to analyze and transform data into meaningful information. * Reporting capabilities that make it easy to draw and share conclusions.
Business Solutions
Business solutions top our framework to show the logical progression you can make toward solving complex problems with SAS. Our business solutions draw on the combined strengths of SAS software, professional services, training and ongoing support. Most importantly, SAS has experience solving problems in your industry, including anti-money laundering, expediting drugs to market, identifying cross-sell opportunities, assessing policyholder risks and forecasting demand.
Because of these core competencies, and because we excel in all these areas, SAS provides the most robust approach to solving your business problems – even your most complex ones – through one business analytics framework.

Best Buy vs. Circuit City

Best Buy and Circuit City were the most popular electronic superstores. There were huge conglomerates and very successful in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper will compare and contrast their difficulties in implementing transformational, cultural, and process change. In addition, compare their success and or failure.
Circuit City was a mom-and-pop television store back in the late 40s. Circuit City was starting to grow because they were the first to come out with the superstore format. Through the years, which made them really popular, they started selling appliances and popular electronics. They were known for their stellar customer service. They dug their heels in the dirt and did not change.
On the other hand, Best Buy continuously evolved with the signs of time. Because Best Buy had a strategic plan and stuck to it, they were able to be successful in their growth. Best Buy's implementation of this change and being successful is now considered a best practices for major companies.
The comparison of both of these companies will be interesting because it will give undeniable proof of no flexible, a company could go bankrupt. Industries now are competitive and forever changing. There are only two choices: change or bankruptcy.
In conclusion, Best Buy and Circuit City had some successes and failures in implementing transformational, cultural, and process change. In this comparison and contrasting course project, will get down to the core of what went wrong and what are the necessary changes.