The definition, from Wikipedia , is:
Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, encompassing diverse techniques under a variety of names, in different business, science, and social science domains.
Basicaly, the existence of data alows you to make data analysis.
I have remark about existence of data because not all business (phisical or virtual) are concious about the way their business can generate data that can be stored.
The objective of analize and examine data is to transform into information.
Business don’t store data
Since I started to learn about #BigData and data analysis, I have asked workers and owners of business from several companies about what data they store and what they analyze.
The first conclusion I got is that more business than I thought are not aware that even they generate high value data. Yes, it’s a very important data, high quality data, generated from inside, and they let them to loose.
To make data analysis you don’t need millions of data!
Data doesn’t come from only social media
Data about your company are not only generated on Twitter or Facebook or Google+. I would like to point out that the main value of a business is generated by customers, clients and workers. Every company should store every data from this source!! And analize them, of course! If your business doesn’t have the tools, you can hire some one who can help you to analyze it for a better understanding of your business.
Once the data is stored, the next step is to inspect data, next, to clean data, and later on, to transform data into information, making a little bit easy to take strategic decisions of a business.
In the next days I will write about concrete business that thay do no storage of data, and I will try to put into light what consecunces can have if they study their own data. Apart from this, it’s good to read this new where the investment of small and medium companies on Big Data will increase in the near future because thay know the benefit of data analysis,
Have a nice day!