What is Business Analytics?

Business analytics is the not-so-secret sauce that helps businesses be successful. Business analytics can be used by companies in any industry to transform data into insights that help them solve problems, make money, and thrive. Business analytics reveals data, processes, and other ways to help businesses start up, stay profitable, and continue to grow sustainably as time goes by. Whether businesses are small or large, business analytics is an important factor for any company or entrepreneurial endeavor that’s focused on increasing efficiency, productivity, and revenue.
 
Business analytics is a science that uses data, mathematics, and technology to help organizations make smart decisions. It combines statistics, computer science, and business strategy to find patterns, predict outcomes, and solve real-world problems. People use business analytics to analyze and diagnose operations in nearly every industry—from healthcare and finance to sports and entertainment.

Business analytics is an interdisciplinary field, meaning it crosses many different disciplines and can be applied to many situations. It helps people make informed choices using data rather than solely relying on intuition. Coming from a proactive rather than a reactive stance, business analytics powers everything from grocery store inventory planning to personalized movie recommendations.

Business analytics answers questions like:

• Why are sales down in a specific region?
• Which customers are likely to cancel a subscription?
• What factors predict employee turnover?

To fully understand the field, it’s important to understand what business analytics is, what business analysts do, what careers are available, how to get started (from high school on up), and why studying business analytics is a smart move.

What Do Business Analysts Do?

Business analysts work across industries to help organizations operate more efficiently. They collect and examine data, spot trends, and deliver insights that guide smart decisions.

Common Responsibilities of Data Analysts

The tasks and duties of business analysts and other business analytics professionals can be very different from role to role, but these activities are common:

• Define business problems and determine data needs
• Collect, clean, and manage data
• Use tools like Excel, Python, SQL, and Tableau to analyze data
• Create dashboards and visualizations
• Make predictions using statistical or machine learning models
• Present findings to business leaders

Examples of Business Analytics in Action

No matter which industry business analysts work in, they often work to understand data, apply business analytics, and put their interpretation into action to support improvements or innovations.

• Healthcare: Predict hospital readmission rates to improve care
• Retail: Track customer buying behavior to improve store layout
• Finance: Detect fraud based on unusual transaction patterns
• Sports: Build winning teams using performance data
• Logistics: Optimize delivery routes to save fuel and time
• Sustainability: Analyze utility usage to reduce environmental impact
• Business analysts are key problem-solvers in data-rich environments.

What Careers Are There in Business Analytics?

Business analytics leads to careers in nearly every sector. Current job titles—and no doubt there will be more in the future—include:

• Business Analyst
• Data Analyst
• Financial Analyst
• Operations Analyst
• Marketing Analyst
• Product Analyst
• Data Scientist
• AI/ML Specialist

These roles are found in industries like technology, government, education, entertainment, transportation, healthcare, and environmental science, just to name a few.

The business analytics field is growing as rapidly as business data itself. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that jobs in business analytics (including the category of operations analyst) are projected to grow 23 percent from 2022 to 2032—much faster than average.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed July 2025

Why Study Business Analytics?

Businesses increasingly rely on data to stay competitive. That explains why the job market in business analytics is so healthy and projected to grow. Students studying business analytics acquire the knowledge, skills, and experience needed to solve complex business problems and to communicate data insights. This expertise is in great demand across numerous industries, positioning graduates for exciting and rewarding careers.

If you have a curious mindset and a willingness to learn new processes using rapidly developing technology (just as important as math skills!), you could excel in the field of business analytics. It offers the opportunity for you to take your interest in making data meaningful into a sought-after sector of the job market.

What Skills Do Business Analysts Need?

To succeed in business analytics, professionals typically need:

• Analytical and critical-thinking skills
• Communication and storytelling ability
• Problem-solving mindset
• Business acumen
• Statistical reasoning
• Programming knowledge (often Python, R, or SQL)
• Familiarity with data visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI

How Do Business Analysts Use Data?

Business analytics professionals leverage the power of data to make predictions and identify crucial insights that successful businesses use to stay at the top of their game. 

Business analysts might utilize data from a single business function, like customer service related to a call center or other places where customer feedback is received. Another example is human resources, where a business analytics professional might take a deep dive into benefit utilization, recruitment, or hiring data.

Data can also be collected and linked across many functions or departments, like marketing, sales, finance, and customer service to show and predict customer lifetime value. Data visualization, predictive insights, and scenario modeling tools can deliver all kinds of unique insights across an entire organization.

Business analytics professionals often make data-driven predictions about the likelihood of future outcomes, using machine learning, data visualization, and natural language query.

They often:

• Define project goals and identify KPIs (key performance indicators)
• Extract data from databases or APIs (application programming interfaces
• Analyze and model data to find patterns
• Build and test hypotheses
• Create reports and dashboards for stakeholders
• Recommend changes based on data insights

The procedures you follow as a business analyst vary by role and industry. There are a wide variety of businesses and industries to consider. Within those, some analysts choose to specialize. For example, some analysts specialize in marketing metrics, while others focus on supply chain or customer behavior.

More Tasks Done by Business Analysts

Business analysts play a crucial role in bridging the gap between business needs and technology solutions. Business analytics professionals often make data-driven predictions about the likelihood of future outcomes, using machine learning, data visualization, and natural language query.

Here are a few more processes that business analysts typically perform:

Collect and Process Historical Business Data

In this case, data is pulled together by business intelligence professionals from one or many different data sources. Both structured and unstructured data may be involved. Data is reviewed, cleaned up, and packaged for analysis. Often, business intelligence professionals monitor the amount and variety of data coming in and organize it into reports or dashboards.

Analyze Data to Identify Insights (Trends, Patterns, and Root Causes)

In this case, the business analytics professional, known as a data analyst, makes the data useful by classifying the data and identifying trends. The data analyst and a more senior data scientist with more skill and expertise in manipulating data look for patterns. They may do some predictive analytics, forecasting, and data mining to influence future business decisions, along with  data visualization. (Data visualization is the presentation of data into an accessible format that nontechnical professionals can easily understand). Data visualization can be a big help in making decisions for both management and others with a stake in the project or process.

Make Data-driven Business Decisions and Recommendations

In this case, the business analytics professional assesses trends and works with a business partner to leverage what they uncover. A data analyst may look at consumer behavior trends, for example purchasing habits, to recommend when and where a specific product should be offered—a choice that also determines what kind of inventory the business needs to carry, along with purchasing and production schedules. A business analyst could also review projects slated to kick off in the next quarter of the financial year, look at current inventory and the capacity of available skills across the enterprise, and recommend the kind of positions the company needs to focus on when hiring.

How Much Do Business Analysts Earn?

Salaries vary depending on role, location, and experience. Here are some current salary ranges:

Many business analyst roles offer flexibility, strong job satisfaction, and upward mobility.

The Future of Business Analytics

Business analytics is only going to get more and more important. As data continues to grow, skilled professionals are needed to interpret it responsibly and wisely. Advances in artificial intelligence, automation, and Big Data platforms are shaping the future of the field. That makes business analytics an exciting field for people who want to stay current with ever-evolving technology. 

Key trends include:

• Increased use of predictive analytics and machine learning
• Automation of routine analytics tasks
• Ethics and data privacy considerations
• Real-time analytics for faster decisions
• Use in sustainability and social good

Analytics professionals will continue to be in high demand as companies navigate digital transformation and environmental challenges in both natural and built spaces.

How Business Analytics Help Organizations

All businesses needs technology—and they also need to understand the oceans of data that technology provides. Experts in business analytics help companies find patterns about how customers behave, what sales channels are working, how products and services are used, and how the company is performing when compared to competitors. Some of the challenges business analysts are equipped to take on after studying data analytics:

• Identifying new patterns and relationships with data mining
• Using quantitative and statistical analysis to design business models
• Conducting A/B and multivariable testing based on findings
• Forecasting future business needs, performance, and industry trends with predictive modeling
• Communicating findings in easy-to-digest reports to colleagues, management, and customers

Successful companies now and in the future treat their data as a business asset and actively look for ways to turn it into a winning advantage. Business analytics success depends on data quality, skilled analysts who understand the technologies and the business, and an organizational commitment to using data to gain insights that inform business decisions.

Data management, data visualization, predictive modeling, data mining, forecasting simulation, and optimization are some of the tools that business analysts use to create insights from data. Business analytics leans heavily on statistical, quantitative, and operational analysis, combined with data visualizations to present findings and shape business decisions. For this reason, balancing your technological background with strong communication skills is important in order to do well in this field.

As Big Data grows, so does the demand for business analytics professionals. New database management and analysis techniques and strategies are being developed to answer the need, particularly in the case of unstructured data, like product reviews and social media post interactions in both the paid and organic market. Business analytics careers—encompassing data analysis, business intelligence, and data science roles—address the new methods for organizing, gaining insights from, and making predictions with this steadily increasing amount of information, and frequently incorporate computer science and other technical knowledge.

Business analytics professionals are often part of dynamic teams and need communication skills to help them discuss findings and insights with colleagues to help formulate action plans.

Why is Business Analytics Important?

Business analytics offers many advantages to companies by enabling them to uncover insights into past, present, and future business operations. Rather than relying on intuition or guesswork, companies can look to quantifiable data for decision-making in marketing, finance, sales, or internal processes, to name a few. Business analytics makes this possible with a host of tools that enable companies to exploit their data in new ways. The amount of data collected far exceeds what humans can process, but business analytics tools can not only process the data, they can do it quickly.

Business Analytics Benefits

Business analytics benefits impact every corner of the organization. When data across departments consolidates into a single source, it syncs up everyone in the end-to-end process. This ensures there are no gaps in data or communication, thus unlocking benefits such as:

Data-driven Decisions

With business analytics, hard decisions become smarter—and by smart, that means that they are backed up by data. Quantifying root causes and clearly identifying trends creates a smarter way to look at the future of an organization, whether it be human resources budgets, marketing campaigns, manufacturing and supply chain needs, or sales outreach programs.

Simple Visualization

Business analytics software can take unwieldy amounts of data and turn it into simple-yet-effective visualizations. This accomplishes two things. First, it makes insights much more accessible for business users with just a few clicks. Second, by putting data in a visual format, new ideas can be uncovered simply by viewing the data in a different format.

Scenario Planning

Predictive analytics creates models for users to look for trends and patterns that will affect future outcomes. This previously was the domain of experienced data scientists, but with business analytics software powered by machine learning, these models can be generated within the platform. That gives business users the ability to quickly tweak the model by creating what-if scenarios with slightly different variables without any need to create sophisticated algorithms.

Augmented Analytics

All of the points above consider the ways that business data analytics expedite user-driven insights. But when business analytics software is powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, the power of augmented analytics is unlocked. Augmented analytics uses the ability to self-learn, adapt, and process bulk quantities of data to automate processes and generate insights without human bias.

Pursuing a Business Analytics Degree

Most entry-level roles require a bachelor’s degree in business analytics or a related field, such as statistics, computer science, or economics.

There are many ways to explore and prepare for a career in this area—even before college.

Tips for High School Students

If you’re in high school, here are some ways our academic advisor in the College of Business recommends to figure out if business analytics is a good career for you and polish your skill set:

• Take classes in algebra, statistics, business, and computer science
• Explore spreadsheet tools (like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets)
• Try free platforms like Tableau Public or Google Data Studio and play with visualization and analyses on your own
• Volunteer or join clubs that involve data collection or analysis, including science fairs and business or stock-picking competitions
• Subscribe to online newsletters or other content from reputable sources to learn more about the field and how it’s developing
• Job shadow or interview professionals in data-related fields

If you’re interested in math, patterns, puzzles, or tech, that could be a signal that this is a good field for you!

Choosing a College for Business Analytics

Narrowing down your choices can be a challenge, but these tips can help. Look for schools that offer:

• Accredited business or analytics programs. Employers prefer candidates from accredited institutions, so this ups your chances of landing a great job.
• Hands-on learning with real-world data projects. Putting what you study into action will cement what you’re learning, build your confidence, and help your work performance exceed expectations from the minute you start your internship, co-op, or full-time job. 
• Courses in statistics, programming, economics, and decision science give you the foundation you need for the lifelong learning that our technological world demands.
• Career advising, research opportunities, and internship support let you put what you’re learning into practice and develop personally and professionally.

Nothing beats visiting campuses in person. If that isn’t possible, many offer virtual visits. Either way, ask faculty, students, and staff lots of questions about what it’s like to study and live there. Compare all your options to find the best fit.

Tips for College Students

To succeed in earning your business analytics degree, you’ll need focus, organization, and a commitment to connect to all the resources available to help you achieve your goals. Here are a few ways to set yourself up for success:

• Connect early and check in regularly with your academic advisor
• Get involved in student organizations and honor societies
• Attend career fairs and network with professionals
• Seek out internships, co-ops, and research opportunities
• Build a strong resume and portfolio, taking the time to keep track of important projects and other accomplishments that show your skills
• Six Sigma Lean and Agile methodologies can be helpful tools in refining your skills and putting something extra on your resume. If your school offers either of these, it pays to look into taking the training.

Practical experience will help set you apart in this career field. Keep an eye out for opportunities to put what you’re learning to work. Make it a point to follow up if you are introduced to professionals in the field—those connections are an important stepping stone to your bright future.