As the printing industry evolves, data is becoming a critical enabler of value-based applications for printers of all sizes. For many firms, effectively acquiring, managing, analyzing, and leveraging data is a significant challenge that cuts across all media types. Analytics can be used to help service providers (and their customers) make sense of the cacophony of information that exists in today’s data-dependent business environment. There are many ways that analytics can be applied depending on objectives and applications. Understanding the why, when, and how of analytics will help guide the most appropriate uses.

The term “analytics” has gotten a lot of play in the world of business and technology over the past decade. In fact, I did a quick search for “analytics” on Google’s Ngram Viewer, which lets people search for specific words or phrases across the entire Google Books repository to show trends in writing. As displayed in the Figure below, analytics didn’t start to significantly trend upward until the late 1990s, and accelerates as we get closer to present day.

Figure 1: Google Ngram Viewer Search Results for “Analytics”