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.

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 :)

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.