The King of a faraway kingdom decided to change the laws introducing the divorce.
After 5 years from the law introduction he gathered the Black Knight and the White Knight and told them:
-You, Black Knight, have to go from house to house and count the number of divorces that happened during these years. Instead you, White Knight, yes you! You have to go from house to house and try to understand the leading cause of divorce.
After one year research the Knights come back to the King with the required information:
Black Knight: “Oh my King, during those years 200,000 divorces happened”
White Knight: “Oh my King, the leading cause of divorce is the marriage”
Analytics Definition
If today someone should ask me the “analytics” definition for my grandmother or my highschool class mates, probably I will struggle to find a good one.
I want to try!
The term analytics embrace multiple subjects that overlap with the common goal: to get the right
Yes!
I found a definition of Analytics that could be not accepted by purists.
Get the right information to drive the rights decisions
The difference between a Report and an Analysis
In addition to the first conclusion is important to highlight the difference between a Report and Analysis.
Indeed the two things are often mismatched.
Personally, I define a report as a medium to deliver some informations, for example:
“My Weight is 80kg”
“ The classroom is tall 1,70m on average”
On the other side an Analysis could require a problem identification or finding a solution to a problem.
For example: “My weight is 60Kg, If I want to lose some weight I must eat less sweets and walk at least twice a week”
Often in management is asked to employees to draft reports, then the supervisor will do his analysis and take the right decisions.
In statistics, something similar is the relationship between Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics.
The first one describes and synthesizes information from a data set, the second one allows us to deduce unknown properties of the data set (make inferences).
Indices
The third and last point where I want to focus in this post, born to gather my thoughts, is about indices.
An Index is a proxy of a process or phenomenon
Intuitively the idea is well known.
What is less well know, or often forgotten, is the importance to select a few, two, three at most, and monitoring frequently.
The choice depends on what is the goal we set.
Is important to select just few because once we notice a difference of the indices at time t0 and time t1 we can investigate a possible problem and decide what to do.
Too much indices could be a distraction: “Less is more”
Clearly this is not just my opinion, but it reported several times in a great book “Web Analytics 2.0” (indeed and Engineer Wrote It).
By contrast, if you are analyzing a specific problem you need to gather more informations to go to the root of the problem.
In conclusion we have seen:
- (My Personal) Analytics Definition
- The difference between a Report and an
Analysis - Indices
Homework (for you) (don’t be lazy)
If next Monday you have to choose three indeces to evaluate if your week was positive or negative on the work or family side, which indicator will you choose?
- Revenues?
- If you organized or not a trip with your friends or family?
- Numbers of hours spend on meeting/Total Hours Working?
- How many people have you called after a long time?
- How many CV have you sent or have you received?
- How many meals have you provided with your voluntary association?
Choose three at most, try to estimate them. Then set up the alarm or notification on Google Calendar for the following Saturday or Sunday.
You could also take a note on your smartphone or your agenda.
This exercise wil steal you just 10 minutes and will help you to be confident with analytics.
The following weeks are going to be very busy, so I will vanish from Facebook and Instagram, but I will come back soon, also because I still have to tell you a lot of things on Python and Analytics.
Thanks for reading the article!
If you liked or you think is useful feel free to share 🙂
Andrea
