With the rapidly evolving nature of technology and its applications to various industries, we encounter new concepts that help us become more efficient at what we do. Data analytics is just one of the many new concepts that businesses are now trying to integrate into their processes. While data analytics consulting companies have been around for quite some time, people seem to be confused about what analytics really means and how it is different from data analysis.
What’s the Difference Between Data Analytics and Data Analysis?
Data Analytics and data analysis have considerable differences between them, but they are somewhat connected. At the very least, they both refer to an examination of information. However, analysis is the broader and more general concept, while analytics is a more specific reference to the systematic examination of data.
What Is Data Analytics?
Data analytics defines the practice and the science of all activities related to data. The primary goal is for data experts, including data scientists, engineers, and analysts, to make it easy for the rest of the business to access and understand these findings.
Any piece of raw data on its own has no value. Instead, what you do with that data and how you use it along with other pieces of data is what provides value. This is what data analytics is all about. Every step you take to discover, interpret, visualize, and tell the story of patterns in your data is data analytics. Those steps and actions can be human or machine-enabled just as long as it is used to drive business strategy and outcomes.
Any successful data analytics service should be able to provide a better strategy for any business, which ultimately affects the decisions they make for the success of the company. When done well, data analytics can help you:
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Find Trends
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Uncover Opportunities
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Predict Actions, Triggers, or Events
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Make Decisions
Basically, data analytics utilizes different variables and creates predictive and productive models to challenge in a competitive marketplace.
What Is Data Analysis?
The word analysis alone is a broad term, but if paired with data, you get the process of cleaning, transforming, modeling, and questioning data to find useful information. Data analysis is just one slice of the data analytics pie. Other slices involve other steps that aid data analytics like data collection, storage, and visualization.
When talking about data analysis, it is usually limited to a single, already prepared dataset. You’ll inspect, arrange, and question the data. Usually, it involves running all the data using software or a machine for a preliminary analysis. This is then augmented by an analyst who will investigate and interrogate the data with more content.
In data analysis, exploration of past data is done by experts. They break it down into smaller pieces with the help of statistical analysis and draft a conclusion with deeper and significant insights.
Conclusion
Data analysis and analytics are two very different concepts that go hand in hand. In a way, analysis is a part of analytics, but they both can’t function properly without the other. Analysis involves the collection, manipulation, and examination of data for better insight. On the other hand, analytics is taking that analyzed data and working on it in a meaningful and useful way to make well-versed business decisions.
Gemini Enterprise transforms data and analytics by enabling you to easily and intuitively interact with data by telling a story. Through our data solutions, we use visualization to make it easy for everyone to understand and digest what story the data is telling us. For more advanced analytics solutions, contact Gemini Enterprise.
