Love Your Data

Love Your Data……

Breathe it, Dream of it, think of it as you would think of that special someone.

Hi, I am Nilhan. A Student, a Foodie and now a major enthusiast in the field of Business Intelligence. I am currently a Software Engineering Student and an Intern at One of Sri Lanka’s Premium Technology Solutions partner’s that cater to Industry Leaders around the World.

The term Business Intelligence was first introduced to me by Google :p.  I was doing some research one afternoon about Big Data and the role of a Data Scientist and this term Business Intelligence was quite frequently mentioned in most of the articles I read, so out of curiosity, I looked it up and well there was quite a lot on it, but I could not clearly understand what it was at that time.

Fast Forward One year and I am attending a training program conducted by this cool person who also happens to be one of the very few people here in Sri Lanka to hold a Microsoft MVP status in the SQL and Data Platforms. So on the first day of training the very first thing he had to say was to be passionate and love your data. Which I truly agree on as well, because if you do not love what you do, then you are most likely going to end up doing something quite shabby.

A few minutes into it I came across two sets of words, one very familiar and the other not so. They happen to be “Business Intelligence” and “Data Analytics” and Finally I learnt what the two of them mean and their differences.

Business Intelligence
“Providing the right information to the right person at the right time, to make effective business decisions”

Data Analytics
“Inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making” – Wikipedia

Business Intelligence Vs. Data Analytics
Business Intelligence makes use of data analytics to provide the right information (to the right people at the right time) and the rest is still up for argument.

Also a few other interesting topics we touched on were

The types of Data Analytics
  • ·         Descriptive – Shows What Happened
  • ·         Diagnostic – Shows Why It Happened
  • ·         Predictive – Shows What Will Happen
  • ·         Prescriptive – Shows How to make it happen


My thoughts on this suggests that we are currently in a state of transition between Predictive Data Analytics and Prescriptive Data Analytics, and even though Descriptive and Diagnostic Data Analytics are still in wide use, the future lays in Prescriptive Data Analytics, which gives an organization the ability to process their data into essential information needed to run the organization and also to use it as a tool to make crucial business decisions.

In Conclusion, Business Intelligence and Data Analytics has and will play a major role in day to day decision making when it comes to an Organization and as far as our personal lives are concerned, it could actually help us make better and informative decisions in making the right Choice.


That’s all for now folks, and don’t for get to Keep It Real until next time!

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