Digital Marketing from 1999 to 2012In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin referred to email marketing as “the most personal advertising medium in history”. That was 1999.
Where does email marketing stand in 2012 in the age of social media, omni-channel marketing and big data analytics? Here are some interesting data points.
What is Business Analytics? Business Analytics is the intersection of business and technology, offering new opportunities for a competitive advantage. Business analytics unlocks the predictive potential of data analysis to improve financial performance, strategic management, and operational efficiency.
Analytics is “the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions.” Data analytics software and advanced analytics techniques, include predictive analytics, text analytics and text mining, customer analytics and data mining.
------------------------------
What is BI? BI is the "computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of BI implementations include (1) understanding of a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses, (2) understanding of the relationship between different data for better decision making, (3) detection of opportunities for innovation, and (4) cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources." (Business Dictionary). Most widely used BI tool is Microsoft Excel.
-----------------------------
What is Big Data? Big data refer to data scenarios that grow so large (petabytes and more) that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools. The challenge stems from data volume + flow velocity + noise to signal conversion. Big data is spawning new tools that are mix of significant processing power, parallelism and statistical, machine learning, or pattern recognition techniques
----------------------------
Corporate performance management software and performance management concepts, such as the balanced scorecard, enable organizations to measure business results and track their progress against business goals in order to improve financial performance.
-----------------------------
Data visualization tools, include mashups, executive dashboards, performance scorecards and other data visualization technology, is becoming a major category.
-----------------------------
BI platforms provide a range of capabilities for building analytical applications. Examples are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0. There are many choices and combinations of BI platforms, capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization and BI integrated search. The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization and more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.
----------------------------
Data integration tools and architectures in support of BI continue to evolve. Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) tools make up a big segment of this category in addition to data mapping tools. Organizations must now support a range of delivery styles, latencies, and formats.
----------------------------
BI is about "sense and respond." Analytics is about "anticipate and shape" models.
Shirish Netke
Ravi Kalakota
Business Analytics 3.0