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.

Why a QA makes a better BA !

Some people asked me to write more about how does a test engineer gains an advantage over developers when it comes to being a good business analyst. Here's it.
As a tester, you get access to certain integration and pipe diagrams which are often not given to developers, maybe due to contractual obligations and often because projects are so large that a developer would not like to waste his time understanding the different flows across modules but instead focus on understanding his own module. (Keeping in mind number of modules run into four or five digits)
The understanding of key business flows help build and gain knowledge of systems and also the domain of the project. And a business analyst does just the same !
So if you are looking for a future in analyst or consultant roles, then quality analyst is the role to play in your early  years. Yes there are other ways to go about that also, such as doing a MBA or some management related course, but it then it compromises on your work experience for that period of time.
Take your call carefully buddy :)