Analytics is used by a lot more people then we think; almost all uses analytics in one or other form to make either a business decision or personal decision. Let us say you want to go on holiday, what you do is try and search for possible holiday destination within the time and budget you have. Let’s say you being an owner of a small store observe on a daily basis your customer’s behavior& demand to adjust the stock in tread accordingly.
On the above example, you just need a rational mind to do an analysis and take an analytical decision as the amount of data which you may need to process is small in size and can be handled by any rational human mind easily.
Let’s take another example, almost all use smartphones now a day and many apps installed on it, including weather forecasting apps, that to be repeatedly. These weather apps look very sophisticated and easy to operate. It will tell what you should carry, a sunscreen lotion or an umbrella while planning for your weekend picnic. However, hardly few of us know that the amount of data gets generated and processed to make these all weather predictions are of such a big in size that within one and half hour, it can overflow this worlds all libraries!!
Above two are extreme example of use of analytics and statistical reasoning, let us see some more,
- Walmart, on an average, does more than 1 million transactions every hour over 9000 stores spread across the world.
- TESCO, they have 18000 stores and over 35 Million club-card members, every time any of its member does any transactions, the information gets stored in their database.
- AIRTEL, have 200 million subscribers and handles over 7 billion calls on its network every day.
- VISA, handles over 100 million transactions a day,
In above all for cases, even a simple analysis is not possible without a sophisticated analytical tool and knowledge on using the same.
What is making Analytics and Statistical reasoning so popular?
A recent study by IBM says, over 90% of data has been generated in last two years. Below chart shows growth in data produced in recent years
One of the reasons for such a high growth in the data production is obviously growth of technology; moreover, not just the production but the storage of data grown due to the cost of storage. The cost of storing data gone down as much as 100000 times in last 20 years. This provided the wide opportunity to businesses to store data related to their businesses and use it for making better business decisions.
As we know now, the world has a huge amount of data stored which cannot be processed by any human mind without using a sophisticated statistical reasoning and analytical tools. With the use of analytical tools which can process huge size of data, business decisions become more accurate and resulting into high growth. This is how statistical reasoning and analytical tools become popular and its popularity is increasing at the speed of the data growth rate.