The Role of Big Data and Business Analytics in Decision Making

Abstract

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and big data represents a fundamental shift in business decision-making. Analyzing such so-called big data is today a keystone of competition and the success of organizations depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. Business analytics (BA) represents a merger between data strategy and a collection of decision support technologies and mechanisms for enterprises aimed at enabling knowledge workers such as executives, managers, and analysts to make better and faster decisions. The authors review the concept of BA as an open innovation strategy and address the importance of BA in revolutionizing knowledge towards economics and business sustainability. Using big data with open source business analytics systems generates the greatest opportunities to increase competitiveness and differentiation in organizations. In this chapter, the authors describe and analyze business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) and four popular open source systems – BIRT, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and SpagoBI.