Can you mention the most useful analytical tool that you have used to get business insights for Nokia ?

Amritha, I like the question because it highlights the fact that there are so many applications available and I think that it's good to have a variety of options in your toolbox. Excel is still an industry leader. Everyone knows Excel. In the Business Intelligence world Tableau and Power BI are great options. In the predictive space R and Python are leaders but some drag and drop options are getting more popular. Orange, KNIME, DataRobot and RapidMiner. So there is really no single go to application that has the most impact. I think it's important to have proficiency in multiple applications because the analytics world is very diverse.

Thank you Steve for your thoughts. As a business analyst student I found Microsoft PowerBI and Tableau to be equally appealing and have a clear idea on their pros and cons. But I have a doubt on how you would find out whether Python or R is best for a specific project for predictive modelling. Do you specially use any metric in your team at Nokia to find the one is more suitable for each project?

Companies may make decisions about applications and tools based on a variety of reasons. Nokia deploys PBI because it's a good application and we are a Microsoft heavy company. Personally I like Tableau. I'm working on a project now where we have chosen Python - simply because the lead analyst prefers Python. Nokia does not have a metric to guide application selection. I would say to select the analytics tool that meets your needs. Let the project dictate your selection.