Welcome to “Introduction to Analytics and Business Intelligence Tools.” After watching this video, you will be able to: Define analytics. Describe how business intelligence tools have changed analytics processing and results. Outline the purpose of Analytics and Business Intelligence tools. Define what an Analytics or Business Intelligence tool is, and Identify several Analytics and Business Intelligence tools. Analytics is the systematic compilation and dissection of data, statistics, and operations research to build models to make better decisions. Compute storage, processors, and memory capabilities have significantly increased speed, capacity, and affordability. The data warehousing solutions available now store large volumes of data with low latency. These exponential increases in both capacity and speed for storage, processors, and memory enable organizations to now process petaflops of data with swift turnaround times. When more data is available, analytics are more accurate. Organizations can use BI tools’ built-in expertise to analyze data and find patterns using machine learning based on statistical modeling. Today’s analytical tools have reduced the time to churn data so much that results are now almost real-time. These analytical outcomes can be descriptive, prescriptive, or predictive. Descriptive analytics provide insight into the past. Predictive analytics provide insight into what could happen in the future. In contrast, prescriptive analytics provide insight into what actions an organization should take to create a specific outcome in the future. Business intelligence tools, or BI tools, enable data preparation, data mining, data management, and data visualization. Implementing BI tools is much like solving a puzzle to gain a more comprehensive picture of your organization. BI tools help organizations focus on the what and the why. Businesses use their data to discover what is happening and determine what triggered a specific outcome. BI tools, as highly evolved software, apply statistics and operations research as part of the process of creating inherent intelligence. BI tools also help organizations harness the power of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics for operational and strategic decisions. Users can analyze business operations through dashboarding, reporting, and self-serve analytics based on historical, current, and projected data to transform data into business opportunities. There are many solutions available in the market that empower organizations with the ability to perform advanced analytics. Some of the well-known players in the market are, IBM Cognos Analytics, which integrates Watson Analytics that leverages IBM’s artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Microsoft Power BI, well known for its secure insights, Tableau is known for powerful visualizations, Oracle Analytics cloud known for its conversational analytics, SAP Business Objects known for its intelligent analytics, and Tibco Spotfire offers scalability for small and large organizations. IBM has invested more than 25 billion dollars since 2005 to grow its analytics business. Cognos Analytics is IBM’s AI-fuelled business intelligence and analytics software that supports the entire data analytics lifecycle, from discovery to operations. In this video, you learned that: Analytics is building models with data to make better decisions. Business Intelligence is a technology that enables data preparation, data mining, data management, and data visualization. The software market offers many business intelligence tools and IBM Cognos Analytics is one of the top BI solutions available based on AI.