Is Business Analytics the next BOOM ?

Wikipedia refers business analytics to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Well and rightly said so, now what does it mean to me, you or anyone who wishes to be a part of the next boom after IT. This time there is room for making mistakes as there is no shortage of skilled labour and availability of training. There is a huge corpus of unemployed and ready to graduate job-seekers who will at one signal jump into the vast ocean of this field of analytics.

We are producing around 2328306436 GB of data each day. Now we can't just simply generate this data, we have to make meaning and sense out of it, and build something useful that helps us improve our lives. The previously relied upon "gut feeling" to make decisions, is no longer highly reliable in this technological world.Today VPs' and CEOs' are trying trying to get the best out of their massive data and IT alone can't just help them. Keeping a real-time tab on customer's demands and fulfilling them is what they desire today.

In this uncertain world, how does analytics promises powerful insights, reduced costs and increased profits ?

Analytics converts extensive data, stats and quants into insights that can drive efficient decisions and derive strategies.For every buck spent on analytics, companies reportedly get a return value of almost 1000%. Leave alone the industries, just imagine how much could governments save in terms of operational costs if they were to adopt analytics to analyse their earnings and expenditures. 

 Needless to say but my gut feeling says that business analytics is ready to take the world by storm, and we might be lucky (intelligent) enough to swing a ride with it into the future.

Change in the definition of growth ? Not just number of employees or revenue, but also quality !!!

(Please don't think I am biased to favour the Indian IT industry, I am a part of the bandwagon so I include references to it)

Recently while talking to a senior executive at a company I came across this question written in the blog title, he mentioned that companies have recently started to realize that while growth is important, but increasing number of employees into the firm is no good way to achieve it.

In the last decade companies hired lots of graduates and staffed them into various projects outsourced from abroad. The resources were shown to the clients as resources waiting to start executing the projects. More the resources more chances of getting newer projects. 

One good thing which the recession brought in was growth of analysts and consultants.

10-12 years down the line HR analysts realized that companies have grown to fat sizes and that this is no good way to grow. By simple high school math one can figure out that by increasing resources and doing the same amount of work reduces productivity per resource !

This meant improvising the existing talent so that productivity and revenue both could be increased.

This doesn't mean that we need to stop hiring at the entry levels in the future but we need to definitely get the best people at entry levels itself. By hiring quality people at the entry level, companies will get better people at higher levels in the future. Better people means more quality work is done, ensuring client satisfaction and finally growth in terms of revenue.

So it seems, gone are the days of rampant and blind hiring at colleges during final/pre-final years of graduation. If you are reading this and if you are looking for a job then its time to be not only talented, but also to do your work in a qualitative manner rather than just quantitatively. To tell you the truth, if you are good, people will like to stay with you and companies will make efforts to retain you (in cash or in kind). But if you ain't good nobody cares, there is a huge ocean of people waiting to showcase their skills and talent.

Life as a test engineer (to make it look sophisticated a quality analyst)

Yes, I know the title of this post is a bit strange.

Anyways leaving the title to its own condition, let me write more about what is all the fuss about being tester or developer. To begin the with, the (Indian) IT industry having a glorious past, today has less projects which relate to development of new products or services. Support and maintenance is the flavor of the projects being executed today. For those development guys who I know are clenching their fists, would accept that today instead of development from scratch, there is more of customization work. Platforms have been built, the benchmarks have been set and the pseudo-code is already in place. Definitely this saves time but it can't be called development, rather I would call it customization.

Coming back to the title, the clients or users of products and services of these IT giants today are not only concerned with what technology or platform is being used to develop their products. They want reliable services, defect free products and failure-proof systems. This brings into picture the poor long-forgotten test engineer. Once a looked down upon member of the  team, the test engineer suddenly becomes an all-important member. The test team now works upon a test approach, makes estimates and writes all permutations and combinations of test cases to somehow make the product fail (and win brownie points from the management). But alas testing can never be complete. There is no 100% defect free product nor is their a 100% failure-proof service. More on about the job-profiles later on someday.

There are some benefits of being a test engineer/quality analyst. Firstly, you get to learn a lot in a shorter period of time. A analyst has a complete holistic overview as well as a deep understanding of the product/service (or as you might call it the project). Secondly, it is a bit more relaxed job as compared to developers. Yes, no need to read it the third time, it is more relaxed [PERIOD]. Thirdly, it opens up options for you to become a business analyst sooner than you developer friends :)

Yeah, this is not a complete post. I will be adding on more follow-up posts for this one. Take care.