A Loughborough University academic and a leading practitioner have co-authored an innovative new textbook on business analytics.

In this age of 'data trumps everything', information is regarded as the lifeline of a company as it flows across organisations when they do business internally and externally.

Whether it's the public or private sector, charities or non-profit organisations, industries need data to support business decisions to create new business models, theories and hypotheses that evolves the current ways of thinking.

Professor Tom Jackson, Associate Dean of Research in the School of Business and Economics (SBE) and Professor of Information and Knowledge Management, and Steven Lockwood, a Visiting Fellow in SBE and Senior Executive Information Architect within the Global Analytics Chief Technology Office at IBM, UK, have combined their expertise to bring readers up to speed with necessary background information on analytics and decision-making across a range of professional fields.

The pair have co-authored Business Analytics: A Contemporary Approach – a book that explores the importance of data in providing the analytics for everyday situations and how it's used effectively to drive outcome, improve performance and inform and influence decision-making.

The book, published by Palgrave, comes with a reference architecture that provides a logical view of a solution and details the requirements to operate such a solution, including issues relating to metadata, governance, security, lifecycle management and privacy.

It also shows past developments in analytics that lead up to this new inflection point where diverse, high volume and frequency data can be understood, interpreted and analysed better. Case studies and scenarios are included that describe solutions in a variety of industries.

Commenting on the book, Professor Jackson, who is also a member of the University's Centre for Information Management, said: "With the speed at which data is created, it's time to understand what we can do with it all.

"We are delighted that this book provides a rapid introduction into using big data through to using it in action, by providing possible data architectures. It also has great chapters on ethics and what's next for big data."

For more information on Business Analytics: A Contemporary Approach or to purchase a copy, click here.

ENDS

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