What is Analytics
It is helpful to recognize that the term analytics is not used consistently; it is used in at least three different yet related ways [Watson, 2013a]. A starting point for understanding analytics is to explore its roots. Decision support systems (DSS) in the 1970s were the first systems to support decision making [Power, 2007]. DSS came to be used as a description for an application and an academic discipline. Over time, additional decision support applications such as executive information systems, online analytical processing (OLAP), and dashboards/scorecards became popular. Then in the 1990s, Howard Dresner, an analyst at Gartner, popularized the term business intelligence. A typical definition is that “BI is a broad category of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions” [Watson, 2009a, p. 491]. With this definition, BI can be viewed as an umbrella term for all applications that support decision making, and this is how it is interpreted in industry and, increasingly, in academia. BI evolved from DSS, and one could argue that analytics evolved from BI (at least in terms of terminology). Thus, analytics is an umbrella term for data analysis applications. BI can also be viewed as “getting data in” (to a data mart or warehouse) and “getting data out” (analyzing the data that is stored). A second interpretation of analytics is that it is the “getting data out” part of BI. The third interpretation is that analytics is the use of “rocket science” algorithms (e.g., machine learning, neural networks) to analyze data. These different takes on analytics do not normally cause much confusion, because the context usually makes the meaning clear. The progression from DSS to BI to analytics is shown in Figure 2.