With each passing day, to survive this competitive world, your business must be creating an abundance of data in various forms. However, to use this data so as to make smarter decisions, comprehend problems, and earn a profit, you would need an array of tools and methodologies to convert data into actionable insights.
In such a scenario, business intelligence and business analytics are used to comprehend contemporary and historical data and create insights. But, generally, people correlate business intelligence with business analytics, despite them being two different subjects.
In this post, let’s find out the difference between business intelligence vs business analytics and see how both of these aspects are helpful.
If you want to achieve an in-depth understanding of MSBI (a leading BI tool), then enroll in Mindmajix’s MSBI Training.
What is business intelligence?
In a broader sense, Business intelligence systems are mainly used to maintain, optimize as well as streamline the current operations of the company. This term refers to the technologies, practices
and applications used during the process of collecting, storing, and evaluating data from varying business operations.
Abbreviated for BI, it offers comprehensive business metrics in near-real-time to help support better decision-making. Sometimes, it is also interchangeably used with briefing books, executive information systems, reports, and query tools. With adequate business intelligence resources, you can easily create performance benchmarks, discover market trends, enhance compliance and improve almost every part of your business.
Furthermore, it maintains and improves operational efficiency while assisting companies and organizations in increasing organizational productivity.
What is business analytics?
Just like business intelligence, Business Analytics (BA) accumulates and analyzes data, integrates predictive analytics, and generates rich, visualized reports. The purpose of BA is to help comprehend and discover the weak points of an organization. Furthermore, with advanced business analytics software, you can explore and analyze historical and current data. It also uses statistical analysis, quantitative analysis, and data mining to discover previous business trends.
Once the data has been gathered and evaluated, the BA system uses the same for predictive modeling. In most cases, this not just predicts but prepares for future business climates as well.
Difference Between Business Intelligence And Business Analytics
Clearly, a variety of processes in a business use data to improve the overall operations. However, when it comes to understanding the nuances between business intelligence and business analytics, you are sure to find a lot, such as:
Question That They Answer
One of the major differences between BI and BA is the question that they both answer. When it comes to Business Intelligence, it concentrates on descriptive analytics, which offers a summary of present and historical data to display what has happened in the past and what is currently happening. This way, BI helps find out the answers to “how” and “what” so that you can replicate what is working and change the things that are not working.
On the other hand, business analytics concentrates on predictive analytics. It uses data modeling, data mining, and machine learning to comprehend the likelihood of future results. With BA, you get to answer “why” so as to make more educated and informed predictions about what is going to happen. With BA, you can predict developments and make the necessary changes.
-
Trends in Jobs
In comparison to business intelligence, business analytics is a trendier, newer term, despite the substantial overlap in their uses and definitions. A majority of people conduct Google searches on business analytics rather than business intelligence, delineating the growth of BA.
-
Organization’s Size
The size of an organization comprehends whether BI or BA has been employed. Generally marketed for larger enterprises, the business intelligence tools may also be used by smaller companies that may not be backed by a larger staff and background knowledge in data science but wish to enhance functioning and future plans.
BI and BA In Real World
To illustrate the differences further, let’s take up these real-world scenarios and applications. Suppose you are selling homemade jewelry on the internet. Now, with the help of business intelligence, you get helpful reports on the previous and current state of the business. Also, with BI, you can figure out if sales of a specific product have increased or decreased at a certain selling point. As a result, you can decide to increase or decrease the stock of that product likewise.
As far as Business Analytics is concerned, it talks about why the sales of a specific product went up or down at a certain selling point? By mining the website data, you get to learn that a majority of traffic has come from a specific source. This insight further assists you in deciding whether to continue the promotions in that source or not. You use the information of previous sales to determine how many products you can sell in the future.
Career Outcomes In Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
As far as the career outcome is concerned, it varies in both the domains, depending on the training and the position type you are sought in. A lot of careers need education and training in business intelligence to improve the workflow, meet goals and objectives and decrease operating costs. The positions here include:
- Project managers
- Consultants
- Directors
- Analysts
- Other specialists
Furthermore, in the field of business intelligence, a business analyst is one of the most popular careers. Basically, analysts use available historical organizational data and market data to maximize profit.
Business analytics, on the other hand, is rapidly growing and living up to the standards. The growth in this field delineates an increased use of big data across a variety of sectors to drive the decision-making processes.
Top Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Tools
When it comes to using BI and BA to their best, out there, you can find plenty of tools and software that will assist you in the long run. Amidst a variety, here are the top ones that you can consider using in the processes of your organization.
If you want to explore Data Blending, Predictive and Spatial Analyst, and Business Intelligence, then enroll in our Alteryx Training
| Factor | Microsoft Business Intelligence (MSBI) | Alteryx |
| About | It is a suite of business intelligence and analytics tools, created to assist businesses in systematically share insights and scrutinize data. | It is self-service business analytics and data science platform that can structure and assess data from varying external sources. |
| Features |
|
|
| Benefits |
|
|
| Cost |
|
|
Conclusion
To sum it up, business intelligence evaluates past and present data to operate the current business effectively, whereas business analytics evaluates the past data to analyze the present scenarios and prepare a business for the future.
To run a business, both BI and BA play different yet significant roles to improve business productivity. So, if you are going to make a career in any of these fields, make sure you are well-known for the benefits and consequences of both fields.
Author Bio:
Lavanya Sreepada Works as a Content Writer at Mindmajix. She Writes articles on various IT Innovations such as Java, ServiceNow, Docker, ethical hacking, Machine Learning, Snowflakes, Artificial Intelligence, Security, AWS, and more. You can reach her on LinkedIn.
