‘Analytics’ is a widely used term. And often, the term ‘Business Intelligence’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘Business Analytics’. However, at present, there is a lack of clarity between what the two terms ‘Analytics’ and ‘Business Intelligence’ denote. To understand this partially, it can be stated that where BI focuses on using a constant set of metrics to assess past data & determine criteria like ‘how many’, ‘what happened’, ‘how often’; analytics, on the other hand, uses modeling techniques to predict results & detect patterns. Analytics doesn’t just seek to answer questions like ‘why’ something is happening, rather it answers, what will happen next and in all probability, why it will happen. And predicting outcomes is what a model-based analytics company like EdGE Networks excels at – we are moving away from the BI framework towards predicting the future.     

Today, advanced analytics is powering intelligent hiring, and therefore it becomes important to understand what is done end-to-end. Some of the things that we do with analytics both predictively and proactively are to assess the kind of demands that would arise in the future, if companies are going to lose their people or if companies would need to train the employees on the bench to bridge the skill gap. We enable companies to proactively take action regarding the demand and supply of workforce, anticipate problems that might arise and figure out solutions for the same. By virtue of the skill repository, EdGE Graph, which is an evolving ecosystem of skills, we know how skills are connected to each other, and how farther or close they are to each other in terms of different aspects such as learning curve, demand/supply disparity, ramp-up time, etc. This analytics-powered repository goes through several gigabytes of resumes and job descriptions over different sectors and understands skill patterns, which helps in tracking people who already have a certain level of skills and are looking for an upgrade. 

However, a lot of business processes in Indian organizations use homegrown applications that have been built over time and have been cobbled together without any forethought. But when you look at advanced analytics, you take new data and from old data predict what is going to happen. So the first thing for us to do is to understand the business processes of companies and quantify their data sources. Then through consultative approach, we tell them what they need to record.

Although a lot of products are coming up in the analytics blanket, the ecosystem is still very disjointed. There are tools like Big Data engines, stream processing frameworks, large-scale charting and BI tools along with visualization tools, but there is hardly anything that brings all these tools together on one platform to make it accessible to the consumer in a simple manner. At EdGE Networks, we start by assessing the data gaps of the clients we work with and give them a realistic report on the changes we would make and their subsequent impact. It is also about suggesting changes in their models of recording data. So the conversation is around what we can do for the clients to make certain internal changes - part consultative and part data science. Our data scientists look at data to predict demand and supply trends, increasing efficiency of business processes and give insights on how to solve business problems. So we help companies with not only predictive analytics, but also how to act on the prediction.