While it’s important to stay on top of evolving market definitions, you have to remember the reason why we’ve united around analytics in the first place: More data is available to us every day; the decisions we make on behalf of our businesses are increasingly important; and we look to technology to help us organize and analyze that data. While the technologies that support us in this endeavor have changed over the years, our ultimate goal remains the same: to find answers to the questions that matter—the ones that identify opportunities to push our businesses in the right direction.

This guide helps you define and differentiate Analytics, data analysis, business analytics, data discovery, visualization, advanced analytics. This will dive into the key terms and phrases that attempt to define analytics today, and outline the features of a successful platform. Then you can get to the good stuff: putting your data to work.