Data Analytics: - What’s Data Analytics

Over the years, “Big Data” become one of the hottest topics.  For most of the people, I think the most common question would be “What Big Data is?” and my answer would generally be it’s about analyzing huge amount of data which, it implies that it’s not only “Data”, but “BIG" data indeed. And to certain extent, it’s in fact about producing insights which stimulate your further thinking; options and suggestions for the purpose of making decisions; and finally presenting the fact to improve your understandings.

Another common question is “Do Data Analytics help? And is it useful?” and my answer would be “Yes or No, it’s depends on you”.  I am not trying to trick the questioners, but my thought is that before telling whether Data Analytics helps, you should ask yourself whether you believe in this and what you wants to achieve. It’s like religion, the results sometimes not explainable at all and it’s just about whether you believe or not.  If you believe in it, it would help to make your life easier in some circumstances and, at least, it helps to justify your decision or proof your thoughts.  However, please ensure that you aware Data Analytics for decision any purpose is usually based on only what happened historically only.  If you are looking for prediction, one of the simplest caveats is that future is full of surprise as always.

We should consider Data Analytics as our right hand man who give insights, options and suggestions to make our life easier where we are still the actual decision makers ultimately.  It is always about how you control the tools but not the tools control you.  

From my experience, most people, who dare to believe in data, always said that they would more believe in “experience” bit not figures.  However, my thought is that believing in experience OR Data Analytics are basically following the same logic.  Data Analytics, from my point of view, is to analyze historical data resulting in something useful for decision making or understand the fact.  The way of how’s human brain works on “experience” is somehow similar to how Data Analytics works on “historical data” but human brain is actually much powerful indeed.  Recently some researchers just took 40 minutes with 83K processors in K computers to get 1 second of biological brain processing time where my laptop is using quad-core processors i.e. 4 processors. 

In the view of the management level, there are just thousands of ways to conduct Data Analytics OR leveraging the concept of Big Data.  The most important would be how you implement and manage it into your business, such as the Analytics Cycle which I planned to discuss in the next Data Analytics post…