The main difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics is their objectives. Business intelligence is a set of technologies and strategies to analyze existing business data and provide past, current and predictive events of business operations. Whereas, business analytics is a set of skills, technologies, and practices to explore and extract insights and performance from the past business information to drive successful future business planning.
Generally, data is important to every business organization. Therefore, they use various technologies, methods to take maximum use of data. Two of them are Business Intelligence and Business Analytics. In overall, business intelligence reports become an input for business analytics to analyze data. However, in some cases, it is difficult to distinguish the difference between business intelligence from business analytics.
Key Areas Covered
1. What is Business Intelligence
-Definition, Functionality
2. What is Business Analytics
– Definition, Functionality
3. Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
-Comparison of key differences
Key Terms
Big Data, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence
What is Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is a set of strategies and technologies to analyze the business information of an organization. It involves functions such as reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), querying, complex event processing and business process management.
Business Intelligence can interpret big data. Therefore, it can have structured data as well as unstructured data. Generally, Business intelligence supports various operational and strategic decisions. Operational decisions include positioning and pricing while strategic decisions involve priorities, goals and directions. Business intelligence becomes more effective when combining data obtained from the market, which is external data, with the organization’s internal data such as financial data.
What is Business Analytics
Business analytics is a set of skills, technologies and practices to study past business performance to gain insight and to make a business plan. It involves developing new insights to understand business performance based on data and statistical methods. Furthermore, it is essential to have a quality data set and skilled analysts who understand technology and business to perform accurate business analytics.
Business analytics highly replies on statistical analysis. Using statistical algorithms to historical data helps to make predictions about the future performance of a product or a service. It also involves using techniques such as clustering to find out the similarities between any data points.
Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
Definition
Business intelligence is a set of strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. On the other hand, business analytics is a set of skills, technologies, and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Thus, these definitions explain the fundamental difference between business intelligence and business analytics.
Data
Besides, business intelligence uses past and present data to drive business needs, while business analytics uses past data to drive business needs.
Tools
SAP Business Objects, PowerBI, and QlikSense are some business intelligence tools, while Word Processing, Google Docs, and MS Visio are some business analytics tools.
Business operations
While business intelligence helps current business operations, business analytics helps future business operations. Hence, this is another difference between business intelligence and business analytics.
Categorization
Business intelligence comes under business analytics, whereas business analytics include fields such as business intelligence, data warehousing, and information management.
Main Usage
Moreover, business intelligence helps to identify, develop, and create new strategic business opportunities. On the other hand, business analytics helps to automate and optimize business processes, change business operations and to increase productivity. Thus, this is also an important difference between business intelligence and business analytics.
Conclusion
The main difference between business intelligence and business analytics is their objectives, The business intelligence is a set of technologies and strategies to analyze existing business data and provide past, current, and predictive events of business operations. On the other hand, business analytics is a set of skills, technologies, and practices to explore and extract insights and performance from the past business information to drive successful future business planning.
References:
1.“Business Intelligence.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2019, Available here.
2.“What Is Business Intelligence (BI)? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” SearchBusinessAnalytics, Available here.
3.“Business Analytics.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Jan. 2019, Available here.
4.“What Is Business Analytics (BA)? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” SearchBusinessAnalytics, Available here.
Image Courtesy:
1.”Vizard” By Growthlakes – Own work (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Commons Wikimedia.
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