Modern businesses gather and organize data to inform decision-making at every level of an organization. Past applications of data science focused on amassing datasets and analyzing them incrementally to use over time, mostly for diagnostic and limited predictive purposes. As related technologies evolved, analytics processes and tools advanced exponentially, allowing for nearly instantaneous applications to functions like business analytics and business intelligence.
The online Master of Business Administration (MBA) with a concentration in Business Analytics program from Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) drills down on this evolution of analytics as applied to business management and decision-making. Advanced coursework prepares students to become leaders in the field, equipping them for in-demand, upper-level positions across industries.
What Is Business Analytics?
Business analytics involves applying insights gleaned from data science processes to make strategic, evidence-based decisions. Data science and business analytics are now vital to optimizing operations, securing competitive advantages, growing profits and driving businesses into the future.
Business analytics draws from technologies that use analytics processes to uncover patterns in large datasets, known as “big data.” According to industry giant SAS, “Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. That, in turn, leads to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers.”
Past iterations of data analytics could provide diagnostic information and a degree of predictive insight, meaning a snapshot of what happened and what may happen. Today, advanced analytics processes can accurately predict future trends, prescribe courses of action, and aid in the creation of plans, tools and additional methods to achieve desired outcomes. This drives modern applications of technology to business analytics, integrating data analytics and other advanced technologies with the highest levels of strategic decision-making and business management.
6 Advanced Analytics Trends That Are Shaping the Future of Business
Business analytics and the technologies leveraged by the field are evolving at breakneck speed, with new applications of tech constantly outmoding previous use-cases. However, these developments are iterative, continuously building on ongoing advancements to increase the potential for business gains.
Given this, businesses must constantly monitor and leverage trends in technology applications to reduce costs, improve services, make informed decisions and remain competitive in dynamic environments of rapid change. The following are six technological trends and evolving areas of analytics that today’s business leaders need to understand to keep pace with competitors.
1. Constant Advancement in Artificial Intelligence
Technologies rooted in artificial intelligence (AI) underly most trends in business analytics. AI plays key roles in modern business functions, ranging from data science and analytics applications to marketing, customer relations and supply chain management.
Complex algorithms enable AI to predict patterns and disruptions much more quickly and precisely than humans. As a result, vital notifications come almost immediately to the user. Artificial intelligence enables more accurate trend-spotting and forecasting. Generative AI leverages large language models (LLMs) to increase the communicative and creative capabilities of AI tools, changing how people interact with technology every day.
Additionally, emerging technologies like agentic, physical and sovereign AI are driving the automation of multi-step business processes, robotic AI applications and even regulatory compliance. The result of AI tech advancements is time saved for businesses: A few clicks complete tasks that would take humans a lot longer to do.
2. Human Oversight of AI
It is indisputable that AI can perform many tasks more efficiently than people. However, the combination of AI-tools and users adds context and human reasoning to analysis, creativity and decision-making.
As artificial intelligence develops, so do people’s roles as overseers of the material it processes and the outputs it produces. AI can draw on incorrect information, make mistakes, form biases and provide unusable insights without intentional guidance, training and ethical regulation. Human oversight is necessary to uphold accountability and identify elements that AI-driven applications might misconstrue or miss altogether.
3. Data-driven Decision-Making
Decision-making based on instinct alone can go either very well or terribly wrong. When it fails, it can cause irreversible damage to a business. Adherence to a data-driven culture will reduce risk when making crucial decisions based on factual and concrete data.
Data-driven decision-making is not a new approach or practice. Yet, the capabilities of today’s advanced decision-support technologies and their applications in business analytics and management mean data-driven decision-making is more impactful than ever before. It is a virtual necessity for modern business success. By using data analysis to inform decision-making in every department, businesses can access the right information when and where it’s needed, enhancing all processes and increasing competitive advantages.
4. The Evolution of Mobile BI Tools
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the growing importance of remote business intelligence (BI) and spurred the advancement of mobile BI tools. Business leaders need to make critical decisions on the spot, every day, no matter where they are. This requires on-the-go access to the data-driven insight that informs business analytics and strategy. Mobile BI tools provide this access, ensuring decision-makers have the information they need, when they need it.
Portability isn’t the only advantage of the mobile solution. By having data and analytics insight readily available, business users can take action in real time, untethered to the workday or the workplace. The immediacy of information that mobile BI tools provide facilitates the agility and rapid-response capabilities companies need to thrive in competitive global business environments.
5. Data Quality Management
In the age of big data and AI, the quality of data is of utmost importance. Building tools to gather as much information as possible is pointless if the data itself is subpar. AI and human analysis that draw from inadequate or incorrect data are prone to ineffective or inappropriate use.
To overcome the challenges of ensuring the accuracy of big data, organizations need to implement well-designed data quality management (DQM) practices. With strategic DQM policies and techniques in place, businesses can ensure the insights gained from analytics and AI-tools are accurate and beneficial, supporting effective practices and impactful decision-making.
6. Embedded Analytics and AI
When analytical content is built into software applications such as BI tools, embedded analytics is the result. Modern AI technologies further enhance the potential benefits of embedded analytics, offering quicker and deeper-level analysis for immediate insight within applications.
Key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards are an example. The main idea is straightforward access to data and ease of generating insights and reports. With traditional BI tools, analysis may be siloed, with the requesters and providers of insight being two different departments or people, limited to their scope of information and analysis. Modern AI-driven BI tools with embedded analytics can draw from much broader sources, allowing end users to access cross-functional insights gleaned from all available information.
Level-Up Business Analytics Expertise With an Online MBA
To take full advantage of analytics technologies in managerial applications, business leaders need to understand how those technologies are evolving. Jumping on the newest trends in AI integration shouldn’t be the endgame. End users must fully grasp how such technologies work, if they provide the most effective solutions to business problems, and how to effectively apply them to optimize operations and decision-making.
Today’s companies rely on business analytics professionals to be experts in integrating technologies and trends selectively and successfully to achieve desired goals. Aspiring leaders in the field can gain the expertise they need to best leverage evolving analytics technologies through advanced coursework in the online MBA in Business Analytics degree from FGCU.
Learn more about Florida Gulf Coast University’s online MBA with a concentration in Business Analytics program.
