From the book reviews:
“In Business Analytics: A Practitioner’s Guide, Rahul Saxena and Anand Srinivasan show an intimate understanding of this challenge. They provide background material on decision making in organizations, outline challenges that these organization face, and then point out methods for overcoming the challenges. … With so many organizations trying to build analytical capabilities, this book is an excellent resource for those early in their journey. It will help them understand more clearly what is ahead and the pitfalls to avoid.” (Jack Levis, Interfaces, Vol. 44 (6), November-December, 2014)
Business analytics is used to help people to make and execute rational decisions. This book provides a guide to businesses on how to use analytics to help drive from ideas to execution. Analytics used in this way provides full lifecycle support for business during all stages of decision-making and execution.
The domain of business analytics is becoming recognized and established as a distinct profession. Many companies have created specialized business analytics teams, and several educational institutions offer courses and degrees in analytics. The people in these groups draw upon Operations Research, Statistics, and the Information Technology practices for Business Intelligence, Analytics & Optimization. Practitioners, academics, and consultants are working craft the concepts, processes, and structures needed to establish business analytics capabilities in their specific organizations. This book offers a set of proven concepts, processes, and structures that can help organizations to set up and evolve their analytics capabilities.
The word “analytics” conjures up different images for different people depending on the function that they work in. Business and academic organizations share an enthusiastic appreciation of the realm of business analytics, but they do not necessarily have a common understanding of all that it comprises. This divergence presents organizational challenges in terms of organizational design, roles, skills development planning, educational needs, and career paths in analytics organizations. Effective application of analytics involves a confluence of traditional business, mathematical modeling and information technology capabilities. This book provides a framework for the effective interplay of these capabilities to go from ideas to execution.
The framework forbusiness analytics is also used to embed the use of business analytics into the business culture. It lays out the approach for analytics and provides guidance on how to scale analytics and how to develop analytics teams. It offers a set of proven concepts, processes, and structures that show how organizations can set up and evolve their analytics capabilities in order to achieve benefits in their strategy and operations.
As a guide for practitioners and managers, the book will benefit people who work in analytics teams, the managers and leaders who manage, use and sponsor analytics, and those who work with and support business analytics teams. It includes several real world case studies on applying the concepts of business analytics to decision making to help the practitioner understand the framework and extend it to their specific need.
About the Author
Rahul Saxena is the Director for Smart Global Delivery Transformation & Operations at Cisco Advanced Services. He is an MBA from the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. Rahul has worked on operations management, process improvement, and analytics in India, USA, and Latin America. Prior to assuming his current position at Cisco Systems, Inc., Rahul held various positions at IBM, McAfee and the Indian Railways. He has extensive speaking experience, most recently as a panel speaker at the INFORMS Annual Conference in San Diego 2009, and has co-authored an IBM Redbook on Business Architecture.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder and CEO of Dsquare Solutions, a boutique analytics services and consulting firm. He holds a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and an MS (Industrial Engineering) from Purdue University. Prior to assuming his current position Anand held various positions at Sabre Airline Solutions, Mu Sigma Business Solutions and Dell, all of them focused on building state of the art business analytics and optimization solutions.
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