My good friend, Rich Webb ( he is a BI practitioner who knows SAP inside out), and I were having a discussion yesterday on what exactly is Analytics. We agreed that it would be good to come up with a definiton we could agree on. I cringe when I hear someone say that it is "data mining". No... It is a term that is broadly used for many different processes that support decision support.
So, I turned to the web for the answer. This is a short definition from a popular Datawarehousing vendor "..all programming that analyzes data about an enterprise's business activities and customer information and presents it so that better and quicker business decisions can be made".
Wikipedia has an interesting entry on "Business Analytics", with several topical examples from E&J Gallo Winery and Capital One to Netflix. Many of the examples we hear about are enterprises that market and sell to consumers. However, analytics to improve team performance or getting "getting optimum performance for money spent", has also been used in Sports. One of the earliest examples was described in Michael Lewis's best-seller, "Moneyball" which described the use of analytics by the Oakland Athletics. My two hometown teams, the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots have found success using analytics. Tom Davenport, in his book, "Competing .." describes this application of analytics by sports teams.
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