Business Analytics

Business analytics refers to the front-end applications that are used within a business intelligence (BI) environment. As opposed to standard reporting applications, which report about the mechanics of the running of a business, business analytics provide insight into how to improve a business.

Business analytics can incorporate applications associated with analyzing the following.

• Customers and their behaviors, including customer profiling, call center effectiveness, targeted marketing, personalization of presentation (such as for a Web site), customer lifetime value estimations, and customer loyalty. Customer relationship management (CRM) covers a large number of these topics and is the process of understanding who your customers are, what they like and don't like, and how to manage your relationship with them.

• Human productivity analytics, such as call center utilization, process optimization, and productivity effectiveness metrics. This can be applied in trying to understand when and where the best productivity is achieved within an organization and perhaps why this is true.

• Business productivity analytics, such as defect analysis, capacity planning, financial reporting, risk management, credit management, resource planning, asset management, and inventory risk assessment. What is usually referred to as financial reporting can be grouped into this category.

• Sales channel analytics, including the creation and analysis...