Just wanted to share my perspective on what I see as being five trends that future analysts here in the Philippines can jump on to help them get ahead of the competition as they look for their first job.
1. Finding Unstructured Data on the Internet
Most Data is Unstructured, meaning it’s not easily accessible and stored in an internal database. This goes against the conventional approach to analytics where you write a query to pull data from a big data warehouse and dump it into an analytics tool. For most analysts, trying to find unstructured data and then capture it and use it in decision-making is not easy.
2. Self Service Business Intelligence Tools
Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue, market opportunity or product performance. Self-service ones are easy to learn, sit on a desktop and have more power to do great analytics then a team of 10 IT Engineers did 5 years ago. My favorite BI tool is Tableau. Check it our at http://www.tableausoftware.com
3. Competitor Intelligence
Per Wikipedia, competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.Every successful business conducts competitor intelligence and uses this process in various ways. Some examples for a fast food chain might include:
> Pricing
> Product and Service Offerings
> Targeted Demographic Marketing
> Marketing Promotions
> Location Renovations and Expansions
4. Data Visualization
The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A good pie chart is worth 10,000 rows of data stored in a database. I often say what separates a good analyst form a great analysts, is the ability to easily communicate their findings in a way that makes it easy to exercise good decision-making.
5. Business Dashboards
Wikipedia’s definition of a business dashboard: “An easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance.” That’s a mouthful, but if you are able to deliver all of these items in a single view, you are worth your weight in gold to an analytics savvy organization.
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Decision-Making, Analytics & Intelligence > Philippines 