Business Analytics and

Big Data

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Application Case
Eliminating Inefficiencies at Seattle Children’s
• Background
• 7th Highest ranked children’s hospital in US (2011)
• Continuously looking for improvement
• Problem
• Spent days to weeks for developing simple dashboard
• Solution
• Implement Tableau (BI application)
• Provide browser-based, easy-to-use analytics
• Allows individuals to create visualization to
understand what the data means

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Application Case
Eliminating Inefficiencies at Seattle Children’s
• Results
• Data analysts, Business Managers, Financial Analysts,
Clinicians, Doctors, and Researchers are all using Tableau
• Solve different problems that they could not do before
• Significantly improve day-to-day decision making via dashboards
• Discovered ways to “virtually increase beds”
and treat more patients
• Saved more than $3 million
• Lesson Learn
• Visualization helps getting insight and root cause of problem
• Users in different domains can contribute
toward process and quality improvement
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Business Analytics Overview
• Analytics is the process of developing actionable decisions or
recommendation for actions based upon insights generated from
historical data
• Analytics makes extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative
analysis, explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based
management to drive decision making
• Analytics may be used as input for human decisions or may drive fully
automated decisions

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Business Analytics Overview
• 3 levels/categories of analytics How can we make it happen?
• Descriptive (or Reporting) analytics
Prescriptive
• Predictive analytics
Analytics
• Prescriptive analytics
(Decision)
Predictive
Analytics What will happen?
What happened? (Future)
Descriptive
Analytics
(Past)

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Business Analytics Overview
• Descriptive Analytics
• The most traditional of business analytics is descriptive analytics, and it
accounts for the majority of all current business analytics
• Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that
performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past
success or failure
• Example
• Almost all management reporting such as sales, marketing, operations, and finance, uses
this type of post-mortem analysis

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Business Analytics Overview
• Predictive Analytics
• Historical performance data is combined with rules, algorithms, and
occasionally external data to determine the probable future outcome of an
event or a likelihood of a situation occurring
• Examples
• Predictive Models in banking industry is widely developed to bring certainty across the
risk scores for individual customers. Credit Scores are built to predict individual’s
behavior and also scores are widely used to evaluate the credit worthiness of each
applicant and rated while processing loan applications
• Used in health care to determine which patients are at risk of developing certain
conditions, like diabetes, asthma, heart disease, and other lifetime illnesses

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Business Analytics Overview
• Prescriptive Analytics
• Prescriptive analytics goes beyond predicting future outcomes by also
suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the decision
maker the implications of each decision option
• Prescriptive analytics not only anticipates what will happen and when it will
happen, but also why it will happen
• Prescriptive analytics can suggest decision options on how to take advantage
of a future opportunity or mitigate a future risk and illustrate the implication
of each decision option
• Prescriptive analytics can continually and automatically process new data to
improve prediction accuracy and provide better decision options

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Business Analytics Overview
• Analytics Applied to Different Domains
• Text analytics – aimed at getting value out of text
• Web analytics – analyzing Web data streams
• Many industry-specific / problem-specific analytics
• E.g., marketing analytics, retail analytics, fraud analytics, transportation analytics, health
analytics, sports analytics, talent analytics, behavioral analytics, bank analytics,
insurance analytics
• May result in overselling the concepts of analytics
• Differentiation of analytics based on a vertical focus is good for overall growth of the
discipline

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Business
Analytics
Overview

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Big Data
• Big Data
• Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes
difficult to process using traditional data processing tools and applications
• Challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and
visualization
• The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable
from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate
smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be
found to spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent
diseases, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway

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Big Data
• Characteristics of Big Data – Vs
• Volume
• Amount of data is enormous
• Velocity
• Data are generated very fast,
often faster than the ability to process them
• Variety
• Multimedia data constitute
an important data variety

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Big Data
• Additional Vs from leading Big Data solution providers
• Veracity
• Captured data quality can vary
greatly, affecting accurate analysis
• Variability
• Data flows can be highly inconsistent
• Value
• Usefulness of the data

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Big Data
• 1V → 3Vs → 6Vs → more Vs?

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THE END

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