BUSINESS ANALYTICS - A CHALLENGE TO MANAGERS, RESEARCHERS AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

Abstract

The concept of business analytics is briefly described and some important problems and challenges for managers, data scientists and information technology engineers are outlined in the paper. Three types of business analytics (descriptive, predictive and prescriptive) are considered. At the beginning, the accent is put on descriptive analytics because business intelligence and business reporting have solved a lot of its problems. However, the phenomenon of big data has opened a series of new problems related to obtaining useful information and knowledge from huge sets of structured and unstructured data. It is pointed out that there exists a big gap between potentials in contemporary theoretical achievements implemented into available software tools and its real applications in practice. That will cause the future demands for improvement of management skills and affect the rapid dissemination and application of the concept of business analytics. At the same time it is expected that practical problems will generate new research and technological challenges.