What Is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is a technology field that helps individuals and organizations make sense of the data that analysts collect, organize, and analyze. This career requires technical expertise to analyze and visualize data to help improve company decision-making and performance. In its simplest form, data analytics involves looking at data to find answers to specific questions. Businesses use data analytics to help them figure out how to optimize their productivity, processes, performance, and profits. "Data analytics involves preparing, cleansing, analyzing, and presenting data — it could be big data, streaming data, little/high variety data, etc. — in a way that answers the 'big' or 'key' questions asked by business stakeholders," says Chris Mattmann, chief technology and innovation officer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an adjunct research professor who teaches data science and big data at the University of Southern California. So, what is big data analytics? The key difference is that data analytics primarily involves structured (quantitative) data, while big data analytics may use raw and unstructured (qualitative) data. This makes big data both larger and more complex to analyze. A career in data analytics can create a pathway into many different industries. In fact, virtually any business, industry, or organization with data can benefit from leveraging data analytics to understand how to optimize its business. Data analysts have become increasingly valued across diverse industries, as they play a vital role in driving organizational change. "Skills like those developed by data analysts are highly sought after in all industries," says Theresa Kushner, head of the North American Innovation Center at NTT Data Services, who has more than 25 years of experience in data analytics. "As more and more organizations turn to data analytics and data science to change the way they operate and help them grow and thrive, data analysts are entering the folds of every industry, from finance to healthcare, government to manufacturing, education to entertainment — and collaborating across departments like marketing, finance, and HR." Aswini Thota, a lead data scientist at Bose Corporation with over 12 years of experience in data analytics, agrees that the need for data analysts is ubiquitous. "Data analysts are not just limited to tech or product companies," Thota says. "In fact, any medium to the large-scale company that uses enterprise resource planning systems to organize their operations hires data analysts." Not every organization aligns data analysts in the same way, however. According to Thota, some businesses place all of their data teams under one center of excellence. Others prefer to organize by business functions, such as having a business analyst forecast budgets or solve larger business problems.

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