Businesses in today’s constantly evolving market-place are faced with many

challenges in dealing with ev-eryday issues. Many of these challenges can be overcome

with emerging technologies that are available to virtually any size business. Technol-ogy and computing power

is becoming an inexpensive commodity, so there are lots

of data that is being stored, but how is it being used?

Business and public service leaders have been using data to understand and analyze business performance for years. Whether information is delivered through spread sheets or complex software suites, accessing and report-ing on data is a major aspect of business intelligence. In essence, business intelligence is about facilitating fact-based decision making in a reactive or historical way, which is used to increase awareness and comprehension of the data that is associated with business. Organizations gain a better understanding of their data and how it relates to business initiatives.

While business intelligence will help improve the company’s

bottom line, but due to the fact that it is reactive in nature, it won’t

really drive growth. As a result, analytics has moved to the forefront of many business

initiatives, because they want to accomplish more with their data.

Even in the case that a company makes a significant investment in IT systems and software that deliver business intelligence, the question may arise about how to get the best return from that investment and still utilize analytics? Predictive analytics is the answer. Predictive analytics is a techno-logical, mathematical, and business driven convergence that is concentrated on giving business leaders greater insight to their data. These insights allow them to make better business decisions, which produce better business results and performance. While business intelligence provides awareness of what has already happened, predictive analytics provides insight to what the data means and best possible outcomes, which will reveal ways to help drive growth.

Predictive analytics is com-prised of a collection of

sophisticated mathematical and statistical techniques

that produce forecasts and various predictive models

that are used by Ascension and embed into the decision making process. It is an es-

sential way to gain a strategic competitive advantage. Mak-ing better informed decisions will result in better results. By relying on analytics to provide data-driven insights, business

strategies can be executed with the assurance that the

right decision has been made. Analytics is a concentration of management disciplines that

are quickly being adopted, so instead of relying on intuition as a basis for decision mak-

ing, use predictive analytics at Ascension to provide greater

insights and results that drive performance.