What is Data Analytics?

You've probably heard a fair amount of tech jargon, phrases like data analytics, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, automation, business intelligence... But what does it all mean, and why does it matter?

Social scientists classify the times that we live in as the "Information Age" because the computer has become the driving force behind our social evolution. Everything that has ever been uploaded to a computer, from an entry on an inventory management system to every click ever made, creates data. A lot of data. Roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, and that number continues to increase.

However, this data is useless on its own. It needs to be organized in a manner that we can understand. That's where data analytics comes in - to give structure and meaning to the data.

Well-structured data informs us in three ways. There is descriptive data, which helps us understand what happened in the past. There is predictive data that uses descriptive data to predict what will happen in the future. And finally, there is prescriptive data which tells us the most efficient way to operate our businesses and if properly utilized, builds relationships with clients.

This allows us to make informed decisions. That's one of the goals of the team at Petram Analytics - to help businesses take their customer data and use it to be more efficient, more profitable, and better for their customers.