Business Analytics and Business Process

Business analytics is a fancy name for getting information about your business. Most small businesses (the size is dependent on who you talk to) will probably not want to talk about business analytics because these projects typically have a big price tag. But whether they are big projects or not isn't the issue. The issue is whether there is value in getting information about your business to allow you to better understand your customers, your costs, etc.

Most small business owners think they understand their business, and they do, to a point. What is surprising are the things that they don't see. As a business grows, things change and from the owner's standpoint, they still look the same. One of the first things that I do when I start an assignment, is to look at data that is already being captured in a company. I also interview staff to get the personal perspective. I invariably find things that surprise owners and managers. Through the interviews, I also find out why this is happenning and what may have caused the change. This helps me to provide advice to the owners and managers on how to address the issues that I found. This isn't even close to what business analytics is doing, but the concept is the same. There is no way that a small business could afford the cost associated with something of significant depth.

Why did I title the article business analytics and business process? Because I found an article that talks about the failure or success of business analytics is based on an understanding of business process. If you don't have a detailed understanding of your business process, you can't get good data and you can't get a good analysis of that data. Bad data means poor decisions.

If you develop good business processes, ensure that your software supports your business process to give you good data, you can analyze that data to help you make good decisions.