Book excerpt: Assuming no prior knowledge or technical skills, Getting Started with Business Analytics: Insightful Decision-Making explores the contents, capabilities, and applications of business analytics. It bridges the worlds of business and statistics and describes business analytics from a non-commercial standpoint. The authors demystify the main concepts and terminologies and give many examples of real-world applications. The first part of the book introduces business data and recent technologies that have promoted fact-based decision-making. The authors look at how business intelligence differs from business analytics. They also discuss the main components of a business analytics application and the various requirements for integrating business with analytics. The second part presents the technologies underlying business analytics: data mining and data analytics. The book helps you understand the key concepts and ideas behind data mining and shows how data mining has expanded into data analytics when considering new types of data such as network and text data. The third part explores business analytics in depth, covering customer, social, and operational analytics. Each chapter in this part incorporates hands-on projects based on publicly available data. Helping you make sound decisions based on hard data, this self-contained guide provides an integrated framework for data mining in business analytics. It takes you on a journey through this data-rich world, showing you how to deploy business analytics solutions in your organization.