Analysis vs. Analytics: Past vs. Future
What’s the difference between analysis and analytics? One looks at the past while the other tries to predict the future.
The distinction between analysis and analytics is often blurred and more often misunderstood. Indeed, engineers may think that analytics is for marketers, while engineers do analysis. While there’s some truth to that, engineers can perform analytics that can help with manufacturing and reliability.
With the continuing shift toward the collection of massive amounts of data and more powerful tools to extract hidden insights, it can be worthwhile to revisit the definitive and separate contributions of “analysis” versus “analytics.” As we look ahead toward new advanced analytical capabilities, such as predictive and prescriptive analytics, solidifying these fundamental terms can be a good starting point in understanding what is possible.
Data analysis: What happened?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, analysis is “a detailed examination of anything complex in order to understand its nature or to determine its essential features: a thorough study.” Analytics is defined as “the method of logical analysis.” Embedded in these definitions is an inherent aspect of past and future assessment. For a “detailed examination” or a “thorough study” to take place, the data must exist and occur in the past. The question that data analysis answers, whether based on a single data set or thousands of data sets, is, “What happened?” For example, an automotive brand uses analysis — after the fact — to determine which cars, models, and geographic locations required a recall.
Analysis can be considered an in-depth review and sorting of the current facts, which may be a more-than-sufficient assessment for many decision-making scenarios.
Measurement data of LED failures can show how increased pulse power causes shorter time to failure.
Data analytics: Why did it happen and what will happen next?
Merriam-Websters definition of analytics as a “method of logical analysis” includes the term analysis, but introduces a significant differentiator with the term “logical.” Analytic methods use data to answer questions that occurred in the past, but also provide insights or deductive reasoning to act in the future. Gartner Research covers analytics in its industry reports and defines the word in its IT Glossary . As Gartner notes, “Increasingly, analytics is used to describe statistical and mathematical data analysis that clusters, segments, scores, and predicts what scenarios are most likely to happen.
