Leaderboard

The best one I liked out of these is "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein *Change the thought process. Welcome to the Six Sigma world. I agree to this

I would like to add to the following quote: "If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary"- Jim Rohn Had there been risk, it would never be called Ordinary

@Chitambaram You have rightly pointed out that the above tools are for analysing only numbers. However there are some tools and software that can be used to analyze numbers, text, websites and many more varieties of data. I mentioned that Excel, SAS, and SPSS are used to analyze only numbers. Predictive modelling techniques such as regression, decision trees, clustering, market basket analysis etc are being used on this type of data. Here are the tools that are used to analyse other varieties of data – Website analysis – mouseflow.com is the website that provide the service to analyze the website. A heatmap can be produced by using this service by which we can know where the visitors are spending more time on the website. We can also know in which page of the website the visitor is moving out of website. By analysing the results we can know which web page should be improved in terms of navigation, design. Text analysis – Text can be analysed by using software known as ‘R’. Text includes the content from social media. Many companies are looking for deep insights, customer tastes, preferences in the posts that people are posting in facebook, twitter and other social media websites. So, twitter analytics(analytics.twitter.com) and www.hashtaging.com are other websites that provide an option to analyze the tweets by the people. The other tools that have been used in big data analysis to analyse this variety of data are hadoop, MapReduce. Apache Hadoop is open source software framework to store and process large amount of data. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model for large scale data processing. These are the various tools that have been used by the managers of organisations to get deeper insights from the customers. You are most welcome to ask further questions and clarifications..

@Chitambaram Its great that you have been convinced that data is crucial in decision making. However here is my response on the tools to be used by managers. The managers who do not have any experience with data analysis tools can easily start using them. This is because there are wide variety of tools that have excellent visualization capabilities and easy to use. I will mention some of the tools a manager can start using with- 1. MS-Excel – Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application used for calculation, graphing tools, pivot table used in most businesses. It is an excellent reporting and dash boarding tool. The latest version can handle upto 1 million rows. A manager can start using this tool without any training. 2. SAS – SAS is the market leader in analytic tool world. This software has wide range of features starting from data management, business intelligence, advanced analytics and predictive analytics. This tool can be used in all functions like finance, human resources, IT, operations, marketing in an organisation. It is an expensive tool and a manager need to be trained to utilize all features of this tool. 3. SPSS – SPSS is a predictive analytic software which guides in predicting future and help in making smarter decisions. It is acquired by IBM. This software is widely used by market researchers, marketing organisations and many other managers. Some of the other popular tools available data analysis are Statistica, Salfors systems, Matlab, KXEN, Weka, R(open source software). These are the widely used tools for managing purposes. There are many online guides available on how to use these tools. Hope i answered your question on how a manager can start using these tools.