Depending on the vendor and the business intelligence tool they're trying to push onto your desk, the word analytics can mean anything from data analysis to measuring call center response or data mining efforts. As one industry research expert notes, the term is so broad and defined so differently by so many players, that it can present a huge hurdle to IT leaders hoping to pull it in for various efforts. Gartner, an IT research firm, defines analytics as the capability to "leverage data in a particular functional process (or application) to enable context-specific insight that is actionable." Find out why it's very different from business intelligence. though there is some overlap between the two.
For more on defining IT analytics:
- read this article [1] at BPM Today
Links:
[1] http://www.bpm-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=11300002T3D8