AnalyticOps: Part 2 - What is an Analytic Anyway? cont.

On Monday, I outlined my view of what makes "an analytic" and the jargon that goes along with it. I ended the post wondering whether "an analytic" is just another name for "business rules" that organizations tend to follow today. In my view, the main difference between the two, which might be no difference at all for a given situation, is that "analytics" are generally more complex mathematically and operate on a more general "feature space". This generalization allows rigorously developed techniques from statistics and applied mathematics to have a chance at being applied to a messy real world problem. Business rules tend to be more human understandable and more directly embedded into the specific data formats or information processing software used by a business.