Business Analytics Lecture Notes

good evening friends and uh welcome back to the channel 360 digit mg Channel I'm um hoping and wishing everybody good health and um as part of this one week session we will be discussing about business analytics my name is sharid if you are joining for the first time then this is my introduction I'm uh bringing up my profile this is my name and I'm one of the directors with in etics and a co-founder as well and I predominantly work in the space of um AI implementations so machine learning operations and data engineering subject is something that we will have to uh Implement on the uh Business Solutions that we are developing so all the solutions that are developed for various C customers from different domains right so that's implementation part is taken care by me and my team I have overall 17 years of experience friends and U I'm one of the faculty for various visiting uh visiting faculty for various uh universities and colleges so this is my uh profile U at a very brief intro you can always connect with me if you have any questions you do not hesitate you can always post your questions with me all right and I I do keep sharing interesting content you might want to also consume that now coming to the topic that we are going to discuss it's about business analyst or business analytics I would want you people to understand what is this business analytics is all about right so who is a business analyst what exact exactly is expected from business analyst and you also want to understand what is the difference between a data analytics role with business analytics role because nowadays we are seeing a lot of traction with respect to data science machine learning data analytics business analytics it's all these are different terminologies that you come across so what is the difference is also something that you will be understanding but I'll keep that part to a later stage first let us understand what is business analytics now you might want to take advantage of various resources that are available on the 360 digit mg YouTube channel via which you are connecting right now if you go to the playlist or if you go to the video section you'll be able to see so much of content readily available now we are going to discuss we're connecting And discussing for next one week right starting today so we may not be able to cover a lot of things but I would encourage you people to connect to this YouTube channel and go through the entire playlist so that you gain more knowledge on the subject and you can also go through the various other uh Concepts also like data science concepts are there tblo one of the popular um tool in the industry for business analytics you might also want to learn U that those Concepts as well right so different content is readily available I would encourage you people to use this resource for taking your skills to Next Level now let us jump and start with business analytics so the first thing is introduction to business analytics we basically call it as business analytics primer or business analytics 101 so what exactly is this what is required by a business analyst what is the things that business analyst do so if I talk about a business analyst right the role BAS basically talks about ensuring that the businesses are running smoothy and the success or the efficiency of the businesses is consistently growing right that is the overall job requirement of a business analyst now in order to achieve this particular objective that means in order to ensure that the businesses are running in profits a business analyst will look into the business processes how the business is running what are the steps the business is maintaining or following ensuring that everybody in the business is following that standard process by defining those standards and ensuring documentation is being available made available right and ensuring that the services are also run with good quality right Quality Maintenance is also important these are basically the top priorities for a business analytics so we need to ensure that the efficiency of the business is always up all right so what exactly we do here how do we achieve this is also something that you need to understand I'll explain that also so whenever there is a business requirement it could be existing business you are trying to do some new strategy implementation or it is a complete new business so these are the cases then how do you handle it the first thing is you gather the requirements very very important what is that your business objective is what is that you want to do as a business right so you gather all the requirements you will be creating a documentation here which records everything all the aspects right you will generate reports in order to ensure you get some clarity here it could be the reports that you are generating from the past data or you are also trying to do some estimation that's so you look into the past you'll also try and estimate the future to get results you'll ensure that quality is always maintained whatever your business is doing right you always ensure that quality is maintained and for that you need to be Define some benchmarks for each and every process that is running you will have to Define some benchmarks you'll also look into financi IAL aspects financial analysis right you also try and understand the um I should say the complexity of the business with respect to um its it related implementations you'll also have to talk to your customers and understand what they exactly expect from the business so you also have to study the customer Behavior so on so forth there are various such requirements that you'll have to do in order to achieve all this the first and foremost techniques that you should be equipped with you should be logical you should have business knowledge and you should be more logical reasoning skills should be there you also have to start thinking creatively new ideas have to always be suggested by business analysts right you also have to talk about statistical Concepts because ultimately reasoning and quantifying will come through statistical implementations you'll also be doing machine learning forecasting predictions right you'll also be implementing some machine learning related aspects so there are many such technical requirements also that comes in but that doesn't directly fall under your scope all right so you would uh probably try and learn more from the business aspects rather than technical aspects all right so this is basically the definition of business analyst and we will try and understand the phases of business analytics how do you proceed what are the different phases that you'll have to look into from a business analyst perspective then we will talk about the differences and then we will also look into some of the applications right so these are the this is the core discussion points that we will be having now I want you I want to direct you people to 360 digit mg website okay this is the 360 digit mg website I want want everybody to come to this website here there are many learning resources okay so many learning resources mind maps blogs learning resources right so click on this learning resources and if you scroll down there are different resources that you can take advantage of all right so we will be discussing about about these things also as in how we proceed we will try and understand what does each of this tablet talks about they are pretty straightforward understandable by looking into the names this is data science book if you want to fretch you can download your own book and this is a work book practice now what I want you people to focus on is this mind M when you click on learn mode you'll get mind maps Okay so if if I make you back this is what you're going to get when you click on mind map you'll get this so you can see there are different mind maps that are available here okay for different uh skills that are required in the industry right now you have all these uh different mind maps readily made available for you so that your learning becomes simple I want you people to focus on the first mind map which talks about data science mind map okay the first one data science workflow in this mind map you would understand that the business analytics related steps are mvde the part of this you can see business understanding that's the in fact the first stage that we will have to get T only then the data science implementations come into the picture all right so that's the um I should say this this basically is the overview complete overview of your journey into business related solution developments all right now whenever we talk about any business any business if you have to help the business you need to try and understand the entire business in a very clear and crisp manner I should say 360° view you need to have 360° view of the business this is called as business understanding now business understanding is basically trying to understand the entire business along with the scope of the problem that you are trying to solve all right so requirement Gathering is the first stage and here we are thinking through the business aspects now I want to give a very good a very simple example I should say this is my favorite example we basically talk about tasks being assigned right so there's a business and business has some tasks how do we handle this task right so business says go and get right some stuff go and get some stuff from Super Market okay we'll say go and get milk for example so business is giving this job or business is doing this job right now when you are a business analyst you'll have to try and understand the entire 360 view of this okay like you start questioning you said okay you're basically having this task in a business which says go to supermarket go and get milk from Supermarket when should you go to what place you have to go Supermarket fine which Supermarket right how many milk packets or quantity of the milk packets or milk as such is something that you'll have to ask so there will be so many such questions that would be around rised if you start questioning things from business profit perspective business success perspective all right so these are very very important questions that we'll have to look into when we talking about any business implementation now I will be talking about the phases of business Analytics very important so when I talk about phases for any business I would classify the business stages broadly into two segments two sections one is the past the other one is the future you are in the current you're at the present but you're looking into the past and you're also trying to look into the future so that that at the present you take appropriate business decisions so business analyst has to look into the past and also have to Peak into the future so that the businesses can get some evidences in order for them to take appropriate business decisions so that the profit is always there in future efficiency is always improving for the business all right so this is how I personally would see business analytics tools now the past is further classified into two one is basically talking about what happened we talking about past right so what all things happened yesterday or till yesterday or till now this very moment right one step back to the very movement what happened so this is past tense this is the first question that we will have to look at now as a business analyst in order to achieve this what you do is take the entire past information and that information can be extracted from past data we call this as historical data so we look into all the transactions that happened in the past and then we try to generate reports these reports will summarize the incidents that have happen you may not be able to see the bigger picture the complete picture because there are various aspects in the business that happen right you may not be able to achieve uh you may not be able to see all of that but when you generate the reports you'll get that view holistic view of what exactly is happening in the OR happened in the past so that is the first point that we will look into when we say pass but this is not the only thing that we will have to do as a business analyst you also have to investigate from the business perspective you'll have to reason things and understand why something happened why it happened this is also called as root cause analysis reasoning this would tell us or this will help us to identify the factors or the reasons which are causing an effect in the business or caused an effect in the business this is past tense now once you are able to understand the factors the causing agents the reasons then you would be able to take these factors and the effect of the factors on the result and then you'll be able to map that for future here we can basically say okay in the past this happened and this happened because of this reason if the same reason is continuing then we may see the future this way so we say what may happen what can happen we always say what may happen we don't say this will happen because it's future we don't know all right so this is the third stage now this is this is very interesting this is where business analysts primary strength comes into the picture as your business people you understand how the business runs the logic of the business the profit and right various factors inside information about the business is available and with this research that you are doing to find out the reasons you know on what may happen in future and you also know what is causing that eff that means you would be able to you'll be able to basically make suggestions recommendations to the business to control that factors you're controlling the factors right you suggest on what controls you have to implement in the business to overall control this factors so that you get the desired results what should be done this is very very important step that a business analyst senior business analyst or a business Expert would be able to do now these four stages are the bread and butter of all the projects that we talk about whether it does business analytics projects with machine learning projects with data analytics projects these are the four life cycle stages that we look at we basically represent the first one or we we give names to them the first name which talks about what happened we talking about past we call this as dis descriptive analytics okay we call it as descriptive analys this is where reports are getting generated the second one basically talks about what caused the outcome or what influenced the outcome or why something happen this one is called as diagnostic anal diagnostic analytics here we do root cause analysis research diagnostic test will be performed various tests will be performed in order to get the identification of the factors which are causing the effect so we also try to interpret by by doing this test right we also try and interpret the cause and effect relationship okay this is something that we will be able to explain cause and now once this is identified then comes the third stage which basically talks about what may happen and here we call this as Predictive Analytics we try to use the concepts of data science the concepts of statistical analysis right the concepts of uh this business relationships all of them will be combined to come up with the Quantified mechanism we we try to represent this cause and effect relationship in a mathematical model we try to represent the relation in a mathematical equation right this is basically your Predictive Analytics if I know the cause and effect relationship if I can quantify it measure it then I will come up with the fourth stage which basically says what should be done what should we do right so here we basically call this as prescriptive anal so these are the four terminologies that you should remember predictive prescriptive very important we'll talk about this from future perspective all right so if I try and generate the slide so I'm basically trying to talk about types of analytics or we can say stages of analysis why we call this as stages is because you're you're going to go through the steps in the same sequential order first stage is looking into past which basically again I'm quickly writing this what happened now in order to explain this right what happened question just imagine that you are going to a doctor in front of the doctor you would in the consultation right when you first meet the doctor in the consultation you basically explain the symptoms what are the various um conditions that you are going through what is that you're experiencing you'll have to explain that you describing it to the doctor so the doctor understands what happened this is descriptive analytics then comes the second stage and here we are talking about past only working on past only but we are saying why something happened so you're trying to find out reasons reasons so what does doctor do immediately after the consultation in the consultation doctor will not directly start treating anything right you may say I have covid isn't it you can say to the doctor that hey doctor I have Co I'm coughing and all that but doctor will not start the treatment direct doctor should evaluate right so you need to do various tests diagnostic tests are performed why to identify the root cause of the problem this is called as Di di agnostic ANS now once the past is done you know what happened and why something is happening so you know the reasons so we try to map these reasons map the information to Future all right you're mapping the information to Future this basically calls the third stage here we are saying what may happen so what happens immediately after the diagnostic results diagnostic reports are out doctor by looking at the reports will know what are the major causes right what is the specific cause right I mean specific reason for the the problem that you are facing as a patient if you are a patient right who is the patient doctor would basically try and identify with evidence that hey this is the reason why you are facing the problem now once doctor figures that out doctor would then try to do prediction he say he will not directly again start treating they will start estimating that what may happen so doctor says if you don't treat this problem now then it is going to lead into XY Z doctors would try to scare us by talking about the future isn't it so doctors based on their experience their knowledge their their all the knowledge that they have aced while studying right all this will be brought into the picture and they say that because of these these these these problem s which have identified in the diagnostic test we estimate that if you don't get this problem treated it will lead to so and so problem so estimations are happening this is called as Predictive Analytics and here we try to bring in a mathematical expression for the business conditions so business conditions are represented with mathematical equations the cause and effect relationship that we are talking about it will be expressed using a mathematical relationship we represent that as Y is equal to F ofx where Y is the result that you seek X are the various factors which are causing an effect on y right and F is basically talking about the reason or the relationship okay so how this factors are affecting is explained by this relationship we have to bring in this mathematical equation so that we can pass certain input conditions controlled conditions will be there so we estimate okay so if this is the equation then if I pass this set of input controlled inputs then what I can expect so when you solve the mathematical equation you'll get that this is implemented by Machine learning Engineers right so we basically call machine learning experts to get these things done the skill sets so you can say business analytics is is basically having machine learning as a scope also next comes the consultation as a business analyst you are the expert to make suggestions also so depending on all this information you would say this is in future again you basically say what steps should you take what should be done to control the outcome to control the outcome for the business I want the outcome which I desire right to control and have have desired outcome this is where we do prescriptions we call it as prescriptive prescriptive analytics doctors do prescription now if you go to certain doctors those doctors probably will give medications medicines if you go to a different set of doctors they may do a different practice altoe they may say that you'll have to change your eating habits you'll have to do exercises you'll have to take injections right so treatment might vary okay this is also something very important that you need to understand depending on the experience you will try and give the best solution all right so these are the four stages that you'll have to remember when we talk about business analytics implementation so when I said 360° understanding of the business these are the four stages that we are representing unless until you have the right understanding of all the dimensions you'll not be able to give better Solutions all right now when I come with a business problem let's say I'm a customer and I'm coming with a business problem you working for a business you working working as a consultant business analytics consultant I seek your help all right so when I come and give you a statement you need to look into that statement from all the possible angles to understand and drill down the right reason for the problem and what is the right problem also you have to try and understand all right so this is this is very very important and the solutions that you are developing will basically go through these standard steps the standard steps are called as crisp mlq methodology which is basically the standard steps implemented by Machine learning experts but in the standard development right Chris BQ methodology the initial steps are from business analysts only because the problem has to be handled from business side of things right it's not a mathematical problem that you're solving or it is not a technical problem that you're solving remember you was trying to solve problem for business so the the business aspects becomes the center point there all right now this crisp mlq methodology contains six steps standard six steps of course all these six steps do not fall under the business analytics scope or business analyst scope some of them are definitely falling under the scope so we we're basically talking about those things so the first and foremost step is requirement Gathering as I explained you'll have to try and understand the problem statement from business perspective and try to reason out things to get better understanding better understanding of the business better understanding of the problem that is being hand and in order to provide a solution you need evidences on what happened what is going to happen right past and future both cases and to get this evidence you have to use data data is nothing but the digital form of the past for the business so data becomes very important and you are trying to understand the data also when I said data understanding it is with respect to understanding the data from business perspective in conjunction with the business and we basically try and understand various characteristics of the data which can give us information about the business right so these are the primary two steps which have to be implemented in order to proceed further to any other step once these are done we we'll take couple of examples and understand these two steps also but once this is done the first stage is done that is where the technical capabilities some of the technical capabilities are required we try to refine the ingredients that we are working with here data would be the ingredient of course business requirements also are the ingredients so we try to refine these requirements that we have gathered all the things that we've gathered we call it as data pre-processing stage or Preparation stage or pre-processing stage and here we try to find evidences to support the hypothesis that we are making hypothesis means assumptions that we making so we we first understand what is the basic or default condition of the business and then we will try to make some assumptions we need to find evidences in order to ensure that this hypothesis is supported if you're not able to find evidences that means your assumptions are wrong but in order to deal with this evidence Gathering you need to ensure that the input that we passing which is data is in an appropriate format right it should be in an appropriate format for consumption so here we do a lot of cleaning refining or in short data manipulation after that we go for model building this is where you will have descriptive analytics and Predictive Analytics coming into the picture model building once you are coming up with a Quantified equation to or some equation to represent the pattern the business scenario you also have to do model evaluation whatever the solution that is being s suggested is it a good solution you'll have to verify that check that test that that is evaluation and once you identify the best possible solution then you have to implement that best business best business solution that you have developed we call it as deployment once the solution is deployed for the businesses we will also have to continuously gather the results after the implementation post implementation this way we will be able to get the feedback on how well the solution is working and if required we will try and update the solution or make changes to the solution this feedback and maintenance basically is called as monitoring and maintenance stage this is post implementation so we'll have pre implementation post implementation and of course implementation stage six stages the first one is split into two stages now let me talk uh let me talk about a very simple example okay understand very very carefully friends I'm assuming everybody understands how a credit card business Works how do banks operate the credit card business I'm assuming that everybody is sping now let's say we have a business owner the credit card division owner in the bank and this person says we have a problem we are not we are seeing right we basically say that he we have seen High tickets High number of tickets getting raised um I'll rephrase it I'm basically saying that we have seen suddenly there are high number of support tickets getting being raised they they have got raised and they are now continuing getting raised past and current right present tense and past tense both are being represented by this person in a statement this is problem statement now you are a business analyst how do you decode this statement this is the problem statement you'll have to decode the statement first in order to even think about providing some solution so what could be the problem the problem could be the staff has resigned the issue could be with respect to staff maybe they have gone on a holiday majority of the people in the staff in that particular department they may have gone on lease holiday so with respect to the limited people they'll have to handle more tickets right more service requests have to be handled that could be a problem so this person probably be hinting that he needs to raise more team members right his team size has to be raised or more hiring needs to be done that could be the problem I mean that could be the intention of this person here it could also be that technically there might be some issues in the support system which is probably uh did not give tickets in the past and all of them suddenly are coming to the team at one go everything is being dumped technically there might be an issue the third case is information lack of information for the customers information Gap to ask that information maybe customers are raising this tickets right there could be a number of such reasons as a business analyst you would have to start reasoning start looking into the business case try to understand in which case or what is the scenario for this incident to happen or this person to raise this ticket or raise this concern Sor now if it is a problem of understand then you can probably make a suggestion to the higher management for bringing in more staff or you probably say try to improve the efficiency of the staff by automating certain things right so that is a suggestion that you will make how to automate is also something that you should help with but we'll come to that later if the team is on leave and because of which the remaining team members are taking the load then you would again have to basically take a decision on cancelling the leaves of the other staff members you also have to drill down to a case where you need to understand that is it a continuous problem right you'll have to estimate the future and you need to understand that this is a continuous problem or is it a one-time problem if it is a one-time problem then you can also suggest on why not take Consulting help onetime consultation help temporary staff can be hired or consultations can be given per one time contract and then get this job done you don't need to hire people because it's not going to an ongoing problem this way you'll have to think through and give up give multiple Solutions if it is a technical issue again you'll have to try and bring in the technical team to identify what is the technical issue you also have to as a business analyst you also have to record these problems so that next time when the same problem is occurring or similar problem is occurring you don't waste time for the organization the solutions are readily available because of the documentation that is being maintained so you'll have to work with other teams also to ensure that the process is streamlined this way are also improving the quality for the organization now if it is an information Gap it's a credit card right so customers are not aware of certain offers for example hence customers are calling the customer care Department to ask for that information if this is the case you would have to recommend doing a marketing campaign for all the customers about this offer you have to do some marketing with respect to the offer that is being launched it may be more serious problem problem the serious problem is that customers are calling and saying that hey there is a fraud transaction happened there's a transaction that happened which I did not do I did not get but the transaction went through I want to raise a uh concern on that right I want to raise a ticket for that complaint for that and then block the card this could also be a problem right now the point is in order to understand all this you'll have to look into the department internally you'll have to look into the customer tickets what is the ticket raised for you'll also have to look into the marketing team what kind of campaigns that they are doing etc etc so you'll have to gather the data from the entire business scenarios which are basically getting influenced here or influencing this department and then try to drill out the reasons why the right statement is coming into the picture this basically is called as scope definition so you are not defining a solution here you're defining the scope of the solution that you'll have to eventually de this scope can be defined only when you understand the exact problem which initiated the statement in the first place right problem statement scope you can see so scope has to be identified once the scope is identified then you can think about implementing a solution or bringing in those respective teams who can develop a solution and then the entire process has to be documented as I mentioned that everything that is happening has to be documented and this documentation will be helpful for re implementing a solution in similar kind of a scene this is with respect to business understanding we will take a use case right one example and then disc in detail tomorrow on what are the St steps that we will have to think through and then how do you document things okay so that would be our the right next next next points that we will be discussing now today what we discussed is with respect to the definition of what is business Analytics once you understand the core definition of business analytics and the primary job role once you have the understanding of this role then you will be comparing it with data analytics job Ru I'm a data scientist by profession and for me I don't see much difference between these two okay personally I don't see much difference between these two they hand they go hand inand data analytics and business analytics they always are very tightly integrated with each other because For Business Solution can be problem can be identified in fact by looking into the past data and solution can also be suggested by looking into the data and from a data analytics perspective if you need to do some signs on the data you cannot just randomly Implement anything it has to make logical sense logically it has to be correct and for that you need to see from from what business it is coming right if you don't have business understanding then the solution that you're developing with respect to uh the data analytics um job scope will not make any sense it becomes illogical so they are very tightly coupled then we talked about the stages of Analytics and to remember that we discussed the example of a doctor and a patient relationship it starts with descriptive Diagnostics both of them are looking into the past then we will talk about predictive and once the Predictive Analytics is implemented and we have a mathematical model we will use those models to do the prescription and here we are talking about future so one is to estimate the future Predictive Analytics and the other one prescriptive analytics is to control that future what Solutions you'll have to impl these are the four stages for any business life cycle and from the analytics perspective we'll have to look into all these four aspects and we also identified that the first stage would be to gather the requirements and document the requirements gather the requirements and document them but when you're trying to gather the requirements and document them you'll have to define the scope of the solution unless until you have that 3° uh sorry 360° view you will will not be able to define the scope properly you may get misled by the statement that is given right as as a example I have talked about the credit card exam right so we will have to look into the complete business unless until business understanding is there you'll not be able to identify the problem statement or Define the problem statement also appropriate right so that doesn't going to happen and finally I as part of today's session I also said that business analytics and data analytics right business and data they are very very tightly coupled because business generates data if you understand the business then you'll be able to make sense out of the data same way when you are looking into the data and then trying to understand the data you will be able to understand how the business is running so they are always very tightly coupled right so we basically take this as one step only but for discussion purpose we have segmented this into one a and one b and tomorrow we will be deep diving into understanding on various steps that you'll have to follow to define the scope and document the problem that you are actually going to solve what is the exact problem that you have to solve right by understanding the statement or by decoding the statement you'll have to drill down to that particular problem area once you have identified the exact problem area only then you will start developing the the solution until then you'll not start solution development this is something that we are going to try and understand in tomorrow's session hope you have enjoyed your uh session day one please use the resources that are available here go through these resources which are there on 360 digit mg website you can also try and go through the videos from the YouTube video channel and if you have any questions you can always try and connect with us we will be more than happy to guide you through your career enhancements now as part of these sessions we are also Gathering the attendance people from uh various places various States various right countries in fact are joining this particular session and we want to track the attendance how many people are consistently joining so that we can actually conduct an exam and give a report right a certificate for you people so for that you need to mark your attendance and the link for the attendance is shared in the chat window please fill it up with appropriate details so that we will be able to track your consistent effort in Skilling yourself thank you so much friends for joining the session in day one and I will see you tomorrow always keep your hunger for learning new

good evening friends and uh welcome back to the channel 360 digit mg Channel I&#39;m um hoping and wishing everybody good health and um as part of this one week session we will be discussing about business analytics my name is sharid if you are joining for the first time then this is my introduction I&#39;m uh bringing up my profile this is my name and I&#39;m one of the directors with in etics and a co-founder as well and I predominantly work in the space of um AI implementations so machine learning operations and data engineering subject is something that we will have to uh Implement on the uh Business Solutions that we are developing so all the solutions that are developed for various C customers from different domains right so that&#39;s implementation part is taken care by me and my team I have overall 17 years of experience friends and U I&#39;m one of the faculty for various visiting uh visiting faculty for various uh universities and colleges so this is my uh profile U at a very brief intro you can always connect with me if you have any questions you do not hesitate you can always post your questions with me all right and I I do keep sharing interesting content you might want to also consume that now coming to the topic that we are going to discuss it&#39;s about business analyst or business analytics I would want you people to understand what is this business analytics is all about right so who is a business analyst what exact exactly is expected from business analyst and you also want to understand what is the difference between a data analytics role with business analytics role because nowadays we are seeing a lot of traction with respect to data science machine learning data analytics business analytics it&#39;s all these are different terminologies that you come across so what is the difference is also something that you will be understanding but I&#39;ll keep that part to a later stage first let us understand what is business analytics now you might want to take advantage of various resources that are available on the 360 digit mg YouTube channel via which you are connecting right now if you go to the playlist or if you go to the video section you&#39;ll be able to see so much of content readily available now we are going to discuss we&#39;re connecting And discussing for next one week right starting today so we may not be able to cover a lot of things but I would encourage you people to connect to this YouTube channel and go through the entire playlist so that you gain more knowledge on the subject and you can also go through the various other uh Concepts also like data science concepts are there tblo one of the popular um tool in the industry for business analytics you might also want to learn U that those Concepts as well right so different content is readily available I would encourage you people to use this resource for taking your skills to Next Level now let us jump and start with business analytics so the first thing is introduction to business analytics we basically call it as business analytics primer or business analytics 101 so what exactly is this what is required by a business analyst what is the things that business analyst do so if I talk about a business analyst right the role BAS basically talks about ensuring that the businesses are running smoothy and the success or the efficiency of the businesses is consistently growing right that is the overall job requirement of a business analyst now in order to achieve this particular objective that means in order to ensure that the businesses are running in profits a business analyst will look into the business processes how the business is running what are the steps the business is maintaining or following ensuring that everybody in the business is following that standard process by defining those standards and ensuring documentation is being available made available right and ensuring that the services are also run with good quality right Quality Maintenance is also important these are basically the top priorities for a business analytics so we need to ensure that the efficiency of the business is always up all right so what exactly we do here how do we achieve this is also something that you need to understand I&#39;ll explain that also so whenever there is a business requirement it could be existing business you are trying to do some new strategy implementation or it is a complete new business so these are the cases then how do you handle it the first thing is you gather the requirements very very important what is that your business objective is what is that you want to do as a business right so you gather all the requirements you will be creating a documentation here which records everything all the aspects right you will generate reports in order to ensure you get some clarity here it could be the reports that you are generating from the past data or you are also trying to do some estimation that&#39;s so you look into the past you&#39;ll also try and estimate the future to get results you&#39;ll ensure that quality is always maintained whatever your business is doing right you always ensure that quality is maintained and for that you need to be Define some benchmarks for each and every process that is running you will have to Define some benchmarks you&#39;ll also look into financi IAL aspects financial analysis right you also try and understand the um I should say the complexity of the business with respect to um its it related implementations you&#39;ll also have to talk to your customers and understand what they exactly expect from the business so you also have to study the customer Behavior so on so forth there are various such requirements that you&#39;ll have to do in order to achieve all this the first and foremost techniques that you should be equipped with you should be logical you should have business knowledge and you should be more logical reasoning skills should be there you also have to start thinking creatively new ideas have to always be suggested by business analysts right you also have to talk about statistical Concepts because ultimately reasoning and quantifying will come through statistical implementations you&#39;ll also be doing machine learning forecasting predictions right you&#39;ll also be implementing some machine learning related aspects so there are many such technical requirements also that comes in but that doesn&#39;t directly fall under your scope all right so you would uh probably try and learn more from the business aspects rather than technical aspects all right so this is basically the definition of business analyst and we will try and understand the phases of business analytics how do you proceed what are the different phases that you&#39;ll have to look into from a business analyst perspective then we will talk about the differences and then we will also look into some of the applications right so these are the this is the core discussion points that we will be having now I want you I want to direct you people to 360 digit mg website okay this is the 360 digit mg website I want want everybody to come to this website here there are many learning resources okay so many learning resources mind maps blogs learning resources right so click on this learning resources and if you scroll down there are different resources that you can take advantage of all right so we will be discussing about about these things also as in how we proceed we will try and understand what does each of this tablet talks about they are pretty straightforward understandable by looking into the names this is data science book if you want to fretch you can download your own book and this is a work book practice now what I want you people to focus on is this mind M when you click on learn mode you&#39;ll get mind maps Okay so if if I make you back this is what you&#39;re going to get when you click on mind map you&#39;ll get this so you can see there are different mind maps that are available here okay for different uh skills that are required in the industry right now you have all these uh different mind maps readily made available for you so that your learning becomes simple I want you people to focus on the first mind map which talks about data science mind map okay the first one data science workflow in this mind map you would understand that the business analytics related steps are mvde the part of this you can see business understanding that&#39;s the in fact the first stage that we will have to get T only then the data science implementations come into the picture all right so that&#39;s the um I should say this this basically is the overview complete overview of your journey into business related solution developments all right now whenever we talk about any business any business if you have to help the business you need to try and understand the entire business in a very clear and crisp manner I should say 360° view you need to have 360° view of the business this is called as business understanding now business understanding is basically trying to understand the entire business along with the scope of the problem that you are trying to solve all right so requirement Gathering is the first stage and here we are thinking through the business aspects now I want to give a very good a very simple example I should say this is my favorite example we basically talk about tasks being assigned right so there&#39;s a business and business has some tasks how do we handle this task right so business says go and get right some stuff go and get some stuff from Super Market okay we&#39;ll say go and get milk for example so business is giving this job or business is doing this job right now when you are a business analyst you&#39;ll have to try and understand the entire 360 view of this okay like you start questioning you said okay you&#39;re basically having this task in a business which says go to supermarket go and get milk from Supermarket when should you go to what place you have to go Supermarket fine which Supermarket right how many milk packets or quantity of the milk packets or milk as such is something that you&#39;ll have to ask so there will be so many such questions that would be around rised if you start questioning things from business profit perspective business success perspective all right so these are very very important questions that we&#39;ll have to look into when we talking about any business implementation now I will be talking about the phases of business Analytics very important so when I talk about phases for any business I would classify the business stages broadly into two segments two sections one is the past the other one is the future you are in the current you&#39;re at the present but you&#39;re looking into the past and you&#39;re also trying to look into the future so that that at the present you take appropriate business decisions so business analyst has to look into the past and also have to Peak into the future so that the businesses can get some evidences in order for them to take appropriate business decisions so that the profit is always there in future efficiency is always improving for the business all right so this is how I personally would see business analytics tools now the past is further classified into two one is basically talking about what happened we talking about past right so what all things happened yesterday or till yesterday or till now this very moment right one step back to the very movement what happened so this is past tense this is the first question that we will have to look at now as a business analyst in order to achieve this what you do is take the entire past information and that information can be extracted from past data we call this as historical data so we look into all the transactions that happened in the past and then we try to generate reports these reports will summarize the incidents that have happen you may not be able to see the bigger picture the complete picture because there are various aspects in the business that happen right you may not be able to achieve uh you may not be able to see all of that but when you generate the reports you&#39;ll get that view holistic view of what exactly is happening in the OR happened in the past so that is the first point that we will look into when we say pass but this is not the only thing that we will have to do as a business analyst you also have to investigate from the business perspective you&#39;ll have to reason things and understand why something happened why it happened this is also called as root cause analysis reasoning this would tell us or this will help us to identify the factors or the reasons which are causing an effect in the business or caused an effect in the business this is past tense now once you are able to understand the factors the causing agents the reasons then you would be able to take these factors and the effect of the factors on the result and then you&#39;ll be able to map that for future here we can basically say okay in the past this happened and this happened because of this reason if the same reason is continuing then we may see the future this way so we say what may happen what can happen we always say what may happen we don&#39;t say this will happen because it&#39;s future we don&#39;t know all right so this is the third stage now this is this is very interesting this is where business analysts primary strength comes into the picture as your business people you understand how the business runs the logic of the business the profit and right various factors inside information about the business is available and with this research that you are doing to find out the reasons you know on what may happen in future and you also know what is causing that eff that means you would be able to you&#39;ll be able to basically make suggestions recommendations to the business to control that factors you&#39;re controlling the factors right you suggest on what controls you have to implement in the business to overall control this factors so that you get the desired results what should be done this is very very important step that a business analyst senior business analyst or a business Expert would be able to do now these four stages are the bread and butter of all the projects that we talk about whether it does business analytics projects with machine learning projects with data analytics projects these are the four life cycle stages that we look at we basically represent the first one or we we give names to them the first name which talks about what happened we talking about past we call this as dis descriptive analytics okay we call it as descriptive analys this is where reports are getting generated the second one basically talks about what caused the outcome or what influenced the outcome or why something happen this one is called as diagnostic anal diagnostic analytics here we do root cause analysis research diagnostic test will be performed various tests will be performed in order to get the identification of the factors which are causing the effect so we also try to interpret by by doing this test right we also try and interpret the cause and effect relationship okay this is something that we will be able to explain cause and now once this is identified then comes the third stage which basically talks about what may happen and here we call this as Predictive Analytics we try to use the concepts of data science the concepts of statistical analysis right the concepts of uh this business relationships all of them will be combined to come up with the Quantified mechanism we we try to represent this cause and effect relationship in a mathematical model we try to represent the relation in a mathematical equation right this is basically your Predictive Analytics if I know the cause and effect relationship if I can quantify it measure it then I will come up with the fourth stage which basically says what should be done what should we do right so here we basically call this as prescriptive anal so these are the four terminologies that you should remember predictive prescriptive very important we&#39;ll talk about this from future perspective all right so if I try and generate the slide so I&#39;m basically trying to talk about types of analytics or we can say stages of analysis why we call this as stages is because you&#39;re you&#39;re going to go through the steps in the same sequential order first stage is looking into past which basically again I&#39;m quickly writing this what happened now in order to explain this right what happened question just imagine that you are going to a doctor in front of the doctor you would in the consultation right when you first meet the doctor in the consultation you basically explain the symptoms what are the various um conditions that you are going through what is that you&#39;re experiencing you&#39;ll have to explain that you describing it to the doctor so the doctor understands what happened this is descriptive analytics then comes the second stage and here we are talking about past only working on past only but we are saying why something happened so you&#39;re trying to find out reasons reasons so what does doctor do immediately after the consultation in the consultation doctor will not directly start treating anything right you may say I have covid isn&#39;t it you can say to the doctor that hey doctor I have Co I&#39;m coughing and all that but doctor will not start the treatment direct doctor should evaluate right so you need to do various tests diagnostic tests are performed why to identify the root cause of the problem this is called as Di di agnostic ANS now once the past is done you know what happened and why something is happening so you know the reasons so we try to map these reasons map the information to Future all right you&#39;re mapping the information to Future this basically calls the third stage here we are saying what may happen so what happens immediately after the diagnostic results diagnostic reports are out doctor by looking at the reports will know what are the major causes right what is the specific cause right I mean specific reason for the the problem that you are facing as a patient if you are a patient right who is the patient doctor would basically try and identify with evidence that hey this is the reason why you are facing the problem now once doctor figures that out doctor would then try to do prediction he say he will not directly again start treating they will start estimating that what may happen so doctor says if you don&#39;t treat this problem now then it is going to lead into XY Z doctors would try to scare us by talking about the future isn&#39;t it so doctors based on their experience their knowledge their their all the knowledge that they have aced while studying right all this will be brought into the picture and they say that because of these these these these problem s which have identified in the diagnostic test we estimate that if you don&#39;t get this problem treated it will lead to so and so problem so estimations are happening this is called as Predictive Analytics and here we try to bring in a mathematical expression for the business conditions so business conditions are represented with mathematical equations the cause and effect relationship that we are talking about it will be expressed using a mathematical relationship we represent that as Y is equal to F ofx where Y is the result that you seek X are the various factors which are causing an effect on y right and F is basically talking about the reason or the relationship okay so how this factors are affecting is explained by this relationship we have to bring in this mathematical equation so that we can pass certain input conditions controlled conditions will be there so we estimate okay so if this is the equation then if I pass this set of input controlled inputs then what I can expect so when you solve the mathematical equation you&#39;ll get that this is implemented by Machine learning Engineers right so we basically call machine learning experts to get these things done the skill sets so you can say business analytics is is basically having machine learning as a scope also next comes the consultation as a business analyst you are the expert to make suggestions also so depending on all this information you would say this is in future again you basically say what steps should you take what should be done to control the outcome to control the outcome for the business I want the outcome which I desire right to control and have have desired outcome this is where we do prescriptions we call it as prescriptive prescriptive analytics doctors do prescription now if you go to certain doctors those doctors probably will give medications medicines if you go to a different set of doctors they may do a different practice altoe they may say that you&#39;ll have to change your eating habits you&#39;ll have to do exercises you&#39;ll have to take injections right so treatment might vary okay this is also something very important that you need to understand depending on the experience you will try and give the best solution all right so these are the four stages that you&#39;ll have to remember when we talk about business analytics implementation so when I said 360° understanding of the business these are the four stages that we are representing unless until you have the right understanding of all the dimensions you&#39;ll not be able to give better Solutions all right now when I come with a business problem let&#39;s say I&#39;m a customer and I&#39;m coming with a business problem you working for a business you working working as a consultant business analytics consultant I seek your help all right so when I come and give you a statement you need to look into that statement from all the possible angles to understand and drill down the right reason for the problem and what is the right problem also you have to try and understand all right so this is this is very very important and the solutions that you are developing will basically go through these standard steps the standard steps are called as crisp mlq methodology which is basically the standard steps implemented by Machine learning experts but in the standard development right Chris BQ methodology the initial steps are from business analysts only because the problem has to be handled from business side of things right it&#39;s not a mathematical problem that you&#39;re solving or it is not a technical problem that you&#39;re solving remember you was trying to solve problem for business so the the business aspects becomes the center point there all right now this crisp mlq methodology contains six steps standard six steps of course all these six steps do not fall under the business analytics scope or business analyst scope some of them are definitely falling under the scope so we we&#39;re basically talking about those things so the first and foremost step is requirement Gathering as I explained you&#39;ll have to try and understand the problem statement from business perspective and try to reason out things to get better understanding better understanding of the business better understanding of the problem that is being hand and in order to provide a solution you need evidences on what happened what is going to happen right past and future both cases and to get this evidence you have to use data data is nothing but the digital form of the past for the business so data becomes very important and you are trying to understand the data also when I said data understanding it is with respect to understanding the data from business perspective in conjunction with the business and we basically try and understand various characteristics of the data which can give us information about the business right so these are the primary two steps which have to be implemented in order to proceed further to any other step once these are done we we&#39;ll take couple of examples and understand these two steps also but once this is done the first stage is done that is where the technical capabilities some of the technical capabilities are required we try to refine the ingredients that we are working with here data would be the ingredient of course business requirements also are the ingredients so we try to refine these requirements that we have gathered all the things that we&#39;ve gathered we call it as data pre-processing stage or Preparation stage or pre-processing stage and here we try to find evidences to support the hypothesis that we are making hypothesis means assumptions that we making so we we first understand what is the basic or default condition of the business and then we will try to make some assumptions we need to find evidences in order to ensure that this hypothesis is supported if you&#39;re not able to find evidences that means your assumptions are wrong but in order to deal with this evidence Gathering you need to ensure that the input that we passing which is data is in an appropriate format right it should be in an appropriate format for consumption so here we do a lot of cleaning refining or in short data manipulation after that we go for model building this is where you will have descriptive analytics and Predictive Analytics coming into the picture model building once you are coming up with a Quantified equation to or some equation to represent the pattern the business scenario you also have to do model evaluation whatever the solution that is being s suggested is it a good solution you&#39;ll have to verify that check that test that that is evaluation and once you identify the best possible solution then you have to implement that best business best business solution that you have developed we call it as deployment once the solution is deployed for the businesses we will also have to continuously gather the results after the implementation post implementation this way we will be able to get the feedback on how well the solution is working and if required we will try and update the solution or make changes to the solution this feedback and maintenance basically is called as monitoring and maintenance stage this is post implementation so we&#39;ll have pre implementation post implementation and of course implementation stage six stages the first one is split into two stages now let me talk uh let me talk about a very simple example okay understand very very carefully friends I&#39;m assuming everybody understands how a credit card business Works how do banks operate the credit card business I&#39;m assuming that everybody is sping now let&#39;s say we have a business owner the credit card division owner in the bank and this person says we have a problem we are not we are seeing right we basically say that he we have seen High tickets High number of tickets getting raised um I&#39;ll rephrase it I&#39;m basically saying that we have seen suddenly there are high number of support tickets getting being raised they they have got raised and they are now continuing getting raised past and current right present tense and past tense both are being represented by this person in a statement this is problem statement now you are a business analyst how do you decode this statement this is the problem statement you&#39;ll have to decode the statement first in order to even think about providing some solution so what could be the problem the problem could be the staff has resigned the issue could be with respect to staff maybe they have gone on a holiday majority of the people in the staff in that particular department they may have gone on lease holiday so with respect to the limited people they&#39;ll have to handle more tickets right more service requests have to be handled that could be a problem so this person probably be hinting that he needs to raise more team members right his team size has to be raised or more hiring needs to be done that could be the problem I mean that could be the intention of this person here it could also be that technically there might be some issues in the support system which is probably uh did not give tickets in the past and all of them suddenly are coming to the team at one go everything is being dumped technically there might be an issue the third case is information lack of information for the customers information Gap to ask that information maybe customers are raising this tickets right there could be a number of such reasons as a business analyst you would have to start reasoning start looking into the business case try to understand in which case or what is the scenario for this incident to happen or this person to raise this ticket or raise this concern Sor now if it is a problem of understand then you can probably make a suggestion to the higher management for bringing in more staff or you probably say try to improve the efficiency of the staff by automating certain things right so that is a suggestion that you will make how to automate is also something that you should help with but we&#39;ll come to that later if the team is on leave and because of which the remaining team members are taking the load then you would again have to basically take a decision on cancelling the leaves of the other staff members you also have to drill down to a case where you need to understand that is it a continuous problem right you&#39;ll have to estimate the future and you need to understand that this is a continuous problem or is it a one-time problem if it is a one-time problem then you can also suggest on why not take Consulting help onetime consultation help temporary staff can be hired or consultations can be given per one time contract and then get this job done you don&#39;t need to hire people because it&#39;s not going to an ongoing problem this way you&#39;ll have to think through and give up give multiple Solutions if it is a technical issue again you&#39;ll have to try and bring in the technical team to identify what is the technical issue you also have to as a business analyst you also have to record these problems so that next time when the same problem is occurring or similar problem is occurring you don&#39;t waste time for the organization the solutions are readily available because of the documentation that is being maintained so you&#39;ll have to work with other teams also to ensure that the process is streamlined this way are also improving the quality for the organization now if it is an information Gap it&#39;s a credit card right so customers are not aware of certain offers for example hence customers are calling the customer care Department to ask for that information if this is the case you would have to recommend doing a marketing campaign for all the customers about this offer you have to do some marketing with respect to the offer that is being launched it may be more serious problem problem the serious problem is that customers are calling and saying that hey there is a fraud transaction happened there&#39;s a transaction that happened which I did not do I did not get but the transaction went through I want to raise a uh concern on that right I want to raise a ticket for that complaint for that and then block the card this could also be a problem right now the point is in order to understand all this you&#39;ll have to look into the department internally you&#39;ll have to look into the customer tickets what is the ticket raised for you&#39;ll also have to look into the marketing team what kind of campaigns that they are doing etc etc so you&#39;ll have to gather the data from the entire business scenarios which are basically getting influenced here or influencing this department and then try to drill out the reasons why the right statement is coming into the picture this basically is called as scope definition so you are not defining a solution here you&#39;re defining the scope of the solution that you&#39;ll have to eventually de this scope can be defined only when you understand the exact problem which initiated the statement in the first place right problem statement scope you can see so scope has to be identified once the scope is identified then you can think about implementing a solution or bringing in those respective teams who can develop a solution and then the entire process has to be documented as I mentioned that everything that is happening has to be documented and this documentation will be helpful for re implementing a solution in similar kind of a scene this is with respect to business understanding we will take a use case right one example and then disc in detail tomorrow on what are the St steps that we will have to think through and then how do you document things okay so that would be our the right next next next points that we will be discussing now today what we discussed is with respect to the definition of what is business Analytics once you understand the core definition of business analytics and the primary job role once you have the understanding of this role then you will be comparing it with data analytics job Ru I&#39;m a data scientist by profession and for me I don&#39;t see much difference between these two okay personally I don&#39;t see much difference between these two they hand they go hand inand data analytics and business analytics they always are very tightly integrated with each other because For Business Solution can be problem can be identified in fact by looking into the past data and solution can also be suggested by looking into the data and from a data analytics perspective if you need to do some signs on the data you cannot just randomly Implement anything it has to make logical sense logically it has to be correct and for that you need to see from from what business it is coming right if you don&#39;t have business understanding then the solution that you&#39;re developing with respect to uh the data analytics um job scope will not make any sense it becomes illogical so they are very tightly coupled then we talked about the stages of Analytics and to remember that we discussed the example of a doctor and a patient relationship it starts with descriptive Diagnostics both of them are looking into the past then we will talk about predictive and once the Predictive Analytics is implemented and we have a mathematical model we will use those models to do the prescription and here we are talking about future so one is to estimate the future Predictive Analytics and the other one prescriptive analytics is to control that future what Solutions you&#39;ll have to impl these are the four stages for any business life cycle and from the analytics perspective we&#39;ll have to look into all these four aspects and we also identified that the first stage would be to gather the requirements and document the requirements gather the requirements and document them but when you&#39;re trying to gather the requirements and document them you&#39;ll have to define the scope of the solution unless until you have that 3° uh sorry 360° view you will will not be able to define the scope properly you may get misled by the statement that is given right as as a example I have talked about the credit card exam right so we will have to look into the complete business unless until business understanding is there you&#39;ll not be able to identify the problem statement or Define the problem statement also appropriate right so that doesn&#39;t going to happen and finally I as part of today&#39;s session I also said that business analytics and data analytics right business and data they are very very tightly coupled because business generates data if you understand the business then you&#39;ll be able to make sense out of the data same way when you are looking into the data and then trying to understand the data you will be able to understand how the business is running so they are always very tightly coupled right so we basically take this as one step only but for discussion purpose we have segmented this into one a and one b and tomorrow we will be deep diving into understanding on various steps that you&#39;ll have to follow to define the scope and document the problem that you are actually going to solve what is the exact problem that you have to solve right by understanding the statement or by decoding the statement you&#39;ll have to drill down to that particular problem area once you have identified the exact problem area only then you will start developing the the solution until then you&#39;ll not start solution development this is something that we are going to try and understand in tomorrow&#39;s session hope you have enjoyed your uh session day one please use the resources that are available here go through these resources which are there on 360 digit mg website you can also try and go through the videos from the YouTube video channel and if you have any questions you can always try and connect with us we will be more than happy to guide you through your career enhancements now as part of these sessions we are also Gathering the attendance people from uh various places various States various right countries in fact are joining this particular session and we want to track the attendance how many people are consistently joining so that we can actually conduct an exam and give a report right a certificate for you people so for that you need to mark your attendance and the link for the attendance is shared in the chat window please fill it up with appropriate details so that we will be able to track your consistent effort in Skilling yourself thank you so much friends for joining the session in day one and I will see you tomorrow always keep your hunger for learning new

Transcript for:Business Analytics Lecture Notes

Transcript for:
Business Analytics Lecture Notes