Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics is a fundamental technique businesses

use to comprehend meaning in the massive amounts of
historical data they collect. It is a technique that helps monitor
trends and performance while tracking key performance
indicators and any other metrics you have narrowed down.
However, it is a simple tool and should be viewed as a step in
the process, not the ultimate goal. To reach the best
outcomes, organizations must use descriptive analytics
alongside a predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analysis to
attain more profound insights, accurate predictions, and how
they can improve outcomes.
 Descriptive analytics is the process of parsing historical data to
better understand the changes that occur in a business.
 Using a range of historic data and benchmarking, decision-
makers obtain a holistic view of performance and trends on
which to base business strategy.
 Descriptive analytics can help to identify the areas of strength
and weakness in an organization.
 Examples of metrics used in descriptive analytics include year-
over-year pricing changes, month-over-month sales growth, the
number of users, or the total revenue per subscriber.
 Descriptive analytics is used in conjunction with newer analytics,
such as predictive and prescriptive analytics.
 Objectives of Descriptive Analysis
 Enhancing business performance: Descriptive analytics helps
businesses identify data trends and patterns. For a simple example, let’s
imagine a clothing store tracks past sales metrics to notice that jackets sell
like hotcakes during the fall.
This insight offers the business an understanding of customer behavior, which ultimately
helps it develop targeted marketing strategies, increase sales, and boost performance.

 Leveraging historical data,: One of the most powerful things about

descriptive analytics is its ability to give meaning to historical data. Businesses
can use past data to gain insights into the root cause of what shaped their
current situation. For example, take a company that uses AI, machine
learning, and descriptive analytics to analyze historical sales data and
customer demographics.
This analysis can deliver tangible benefits for demand forecasting. By understanding
patterns in previous sales, the company can better predict future product demands and
adjust its inventory accordingly. This helps the company avoid excess stock, minimize
waste, and improve its bottom line.
 Improving communication: Descriptive analytics can work wonders
when it comes to packaging complex data into something easily digestible.
Let’s say a team leader wants to share information on project progress with
their team and stakeholders.
Using descriptive analytics, they can convert that raw data into visually appealing charts
or graphs. This helps ensure everyone gets the picture without swimming through a sea
of numbers, making communication much more effective and enjoyable.

 Enabling data-driven decisions: Lastly, descriptive analytics empowers

businesses to make well-informed decisions by providing solid data. Imagine
a restaurant owner examining customer reviews to gauge a dish’s popularity.
Descriptive analytics could highlight patterns and trends, such as a specific dish
receiving rave reviews or another with less-than-stellar ratings. The owner can then
decide to promote the popular dish or improve the one that’s not performing well. This
data-driven approach enhances decision-making and increases the chances of
achieving business goals.

Functions of Descriptive Analysis

1) Descriptive analysis is a function that involves summarizing and
exploring characteristics of data .

2) It provides factual information about research and events,

allowing organizations to understand their environment and
activities .

3) Descriptive analytics helps in making strategic decisions,

contributing to growth and customer satisfaction in the e-
commerce industry .

4) It involves using data visualization to explore opportunities and

possibilities, and to increase organizational performance .

5) Descriptive analysis is important in statistical studies as it helps in

decision making and contributes to the reliability of results . It is
crucial to choose the appropriate statistical method and present
the results accurately, using measures such as median and
quartiles for non-parametric data .
 6) Descriptive analytics is a foundational step in the broader field of
analytics, which also includes predictive and prescriptive analytics .

Exploring Business Data using various techniques and

tools
Descriptive analytics can be performed using a variety of tools and techniques, such as
spreadsheets, business intelligence software, and data visualization tools. It is an
important step in the data analysis process as it can help to identify trends and patterns
that may not be immediately apparent from the raw data.

Overall, descriptive analytics is a valuable tool for gaining insights into historical data
and identifying areas for further investigation. However, it is important to use
descriptive analytics in conjunction with other types of data analysis, such as diagnostic,
predictive, and prescriptive analytics, to gain a more complete understanding of the
data and make informed decisions.

Descriptive Analytics Example - Suppose a company wants to analyze its sales data for
the past year to gain insights into its performance. The company collects data on sales
revenue, sales volume, and customer demographics, among other variables.

Using descriptive analytics, the company can summarize the data and gain insights such
as:

 Total revenue: The company generated $10 million in revenue over the past year.
 Sales volume: The company sold 100,000 units of product A, 50,000 units of product B,
and 25,000 units of product C.
 Customer demographics: The majority of customers were between the ages of 25-45 and
lived in urban areas.
 Sales by region: The company generated the highest revenue in the Northeast region,
followed by the West and South regions.

The company can then use this information to make informed decisions, such as:

 Increasing marketing efforts in urban areas to target its primary customer demographic.
 Developing new products to expand its product line and increase sales volume.
  Investing in the Northeast region to further grow sales in that area.

Overall, descriptive analytics provides a starting point for analyzing data and gaining
insights into past performance. By summarizing and visualizing data, companies can
identify trends and patterns that can help inform decision-making and improve business
outcomes.

Descriptive Analytics method

Descriptive analytics involves several methods and techniques for analyzing and
summarizing data. Here are some common methods used in descriptive analytics:

1. Data visualization: This involves representing data in a visual format such as graphs,
charts, and tables to help identify patterns and relationships. Examples of data
visualization techniques include scatter plots, bar charts, and pie charts.
2. Measures of central tendency: These are statistical measures used to describe the center
of a dataset. Common measures of central tendency include mean, median, and mode.
3. Measures of variability: These are statistical measures used to describe the spread or
variability of a dataset. Common measures of variability include range, standard
deviation, and variance.
4. Frequency distribution: This involves organizing data into categories and determining
the frequency of each category. This can be helpful in identifying patterns and trends in
data.
5. Percentiles: This involves dividing a dataset into 100 equal parts and determining the
position of a specific value within the dataset. This can be helpful in understanding the
distribution of data and identifying outliers.
6. Cross-tabulation: This involves analyzing the relationship between two or more
variables by creating a table that shows the frequency of each combination of values.

Overall, descriptive analytics involves a variety of methods and techniques for

summarizing and analyzing data. The choice of method will depend on the type of data
being analyzed and the questions being asked. By using these methods, organizations
can gain insights into historical data and identify areas for further investigation.

Descriptive Analytics Tools

There are many tools available for performing descriptive analytics. Here are some
examples:

1. Microsoft Excel: This is a popular spreadsheet program that can be used for analyzing
and summarizing data. Excel has built-in functions for calculating measures of central
tendency and variability, as well as tools for creating charts and tables.
2. Tableau: This is a business intelligence software that can be used for data visualization
and analysis. Tableau allows users to create interactive dashboards and visualizations that
can help identify patterns and trends in data.
3. Python: This is a programming language that can be used for data analysis and
visualization. Python has many libraries and packages, such as NumPy, Pandas, and
Matplotlib, that can be used for performing descriptive analytics.
4. SPSS: This is a statistical analysis software that can be used for descriptive and
inferential analytics. SPSS has a range of tools for calculating measures of central
tendency and variability, creating frequency distributions, and cross-tabulating data.
5. R Programming: This is a programming language and software environment for
statistical computing and graphics. R has many packages and libraries, such as ggplot2
and dplyr, that can be used for performing descriptive analytics.

Describing data using visualization techniques

Data visualization is the representation of data through use of common
graphics, such as charts, plots, info graphics, and even animations. These
visual displays of information communicate complex data relationships and
data-driven insights in a way that is easy to understand.

Data visualization can be utilized for a variety of purposes, and it’s important
to note that is not only reserved for use by data teams. Management also
leverages it to convey organizational structure and hierarchy while data
analysts and data scientists use it to discover and explain patterns and
trends.

visualization techniques, such as:

 Tables: This consists of rows and columns used to compare variables. Tables
can show a great deal of information in a structured way, but they can also
overwhelm users that are simply looking for high-level trends.
 Pie charts and stacked bar charts: These graphs are divided into sections that
represent parts of a whole. They provide a simple way to organize data and
compare the size of each component to one other.
  Line charts and area charts: These visuals show change in one or more
quantities by plotting a series of data points over time and are frequently used
within predictive analytics. Line graphs utilize lines to demonstrate these
changes while area charts connect data points with line segments, stacking
variables on top of one another and using color to distinguish between
variables.
 Histograms: This graph plots a distribution of numbers using a bar chart (with
no spaces between the bars), representing the quantity of data that falls within a
particular range. This visual makes it easy for an end user to identify outliers
within a given dataset.
 Scatter plots: These visuals are beneficial in reveling the relationship between
two variables, and they are commonly used within regression data analysis.
However, these can sometimes be confused with bubble charts, which are used
to visualize three variables via the x-axis, the y-axis, and the size of the bubble.
 Heat maps: These graphical representation displays are helpful in visualizing
behavioral data by location. This can be a location on a map, or even a
webpage.
 Tree maps, which display hierarchical data as a set of nested shapes, typically
rectangles. Treemaps are great for comparing the proportions between
categories via their area size.

ECM Framework
Enterprise content management (ECM) is a set of
capabilities for capturing, storing, activating, analyzing and
automating business content, in order to provide new value
from data that was previously unstructured and unavailable.
Why enterprise content management is important to your business

Content is the currency that fuels and funds digital transformation. Content possesses
useful information about customers—their behaviors, sentiments and value to the
organization—but only if you can harness it. Collectively, content buried in
repositories, file shares and cloud folders across the enterprise represents the
knowledge of the organization.

As content grows at unprecedented speeds, organizations are taking concrete steps to

streamline their processes relating to content services. “Content chaos”—the lack of
digitized content and the inability to access the right content at the right time—is a
pervasive barrier to businesses today.

Now, more than ever, ECM software is an essential element on the journey to
becoming a digital business.

Where is ECM Used?

ECM has a place in many levels of business, from software to processes to
strategies. ECM needs to be able to capture content streams across channels
(text, video, audio, etc.) But, ECM should also organize, categorize, and
structure all of that content in a meaningful, easily explorable manner.

What a Dynamic Enterprise

Management System Should Be
Able to Do
In the past, we've always referred to enterprise content management's ability
to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver. But, for the purposes of
clarity let's settle on a different acronym. A dynamic enterprise management
system should be able to do CAMPS, or:

 Capture: A smart enterprise content management solution should be

capable of entering content into the system intelligently. This means
digitizing paper documents, cataloging video and audio, and managing
documents across value segments (i.e., contracts, invoices, marketing
materials, etc.)

 Analyze: With all of these documents and contact types now entered
into the system, you need to be able to explore these documents in a
sophisticated manner. ECM should be able to extract and infer
metadata and create bridges between unstructured content and search
 capabilities.

 Map: Creating a pathway between business needs and document

storage requires mapping. Content needs to be stored optimally,
retrieved intelligently, and extracted uniquely. By mapping content out,
ECM not only organizes — but optimizes — your content library.

 Preserve: Content archiving is mission-critical for compliance and

regulatory reasons. Typically, content is saved when changes are
made, so content that requires few human touch points risks being
removed for space in the cloud. Enterprise content management
involves improving archive content across channels to keep crucial
content protected — as well as all subsequently connected data
sources.

 Store: Finding content a home within your IT architecture is essential for

visibility, preservation, and security. Enterprise content management
involves gluing content to specific systems (both SaaS and on-site.)
This makes content retrieval natural — since each component is nailed
to its parent system and roles are spread amongst multiple systems.