What-if Analysis for Business Professionals: Current Practices and Future Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how business professionals perform what-if analysis, identifies their challenges, and proposes a visual analytics prototype to improve decision-making and guide future system design.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into business professionals' current WIA practices and introduces a prototype to support their decision-making needs.

Findings

Business professionals perform WIA with rudimentary tools due to constraints.

The prototype improves decision-making efficiency and confidence.

Identifies needs for better data prep, risk assessment, and domain integration.

Abstract

What-if analysis (WIA) is essential for data-driven decision-making, allowing users to assess how changes in variables impact outcomes and explore alternative scenarios. Existing WIA research primarily supports the workflows of data scientists and analysts, and largely overlooks business professionals who engage in WIA through non-technical means. To bridge this gap, we conduct a two-part user study with 22 business professionals across marketing, sales, product, and operations roles. The first study examines their existing WIA practices, tools, and challenges. Findings reveal that business professionals perform many WIA techniques independently using rudimentary tools due to various constraints. We then implement representative WIA techniques in a visual analytics prototype and use it as a probe to conduct a follow-up study evaluating business professionals' practical use of the techniques. Results show that these techniques improve decision-making efficiency and confidence while underscoring the need for better data preparation, risk assessment, and domain knowledge integration support. Finally, we offer design recommendations to enhance future business analytics systems.