Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics
While choosing between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics, business leaders must do a comparative analysis of these solutions. Here are a few comparison points that will help you choose the right solution for your business.
Business intelligence vs Business Analytics
- Present vs Future Focus: Business Intelligence uses past and current data to make decisions about how a company should run in the present day. Business Analytics, on the other hand, uses historical data to predict what might happen in the future or how an organization can move forward.
A present focus using BI is generally more useful for entrepreneurs who are satisfied with current business operations but want to identify ‘pain points’, increase productivity and streamline processes. But for those, who want to change any major functioning or business model, Business Analytics is a better choice to get useful insights.
Reporting and Analysis: Business Intelligence mainly focuses on collecting and reporting relevant data. The trend in analytics has been instead to provide people with the tools to get their own answers. BA lets people get in the flow of analysis, explore their data, and ask their own questions.
Maintaining vs Revolutionizing: BI is needed to run the business while BA is needed to drive a change in the business.
BI focuses on creating operational efficiency via real-time data enabling individuals to most effectively perform their job functions. BI also includes analysis of historical data from multiple sources enabling problem identification and resolution.
Business Analytics relates to the exploration of historical data to identify trends and understand the information that can drive business change and support sustained successful business practices.
- Ease in Decision Making: Large-scale businesses depend almost entirely on their skilled team of analysts who can predict challenges or market fluctuations. While an analyst is able to access all the information with the help of business intelligence tools, translating this intelligence into a useful resource is not possible without analytics.
Business analytics help identify growth patterns, economic shifts, and future market trends on the basis of historical data and the current functionality of the business. So, when it comes to forming major decisions, the analytical perspective is most crucial because it doesn’t just tell you about an enterprise’s current state but can also see ahead.
- Applications: Business Intelligence is used by most of the companies to run current business operations. For example, if you’d like to reach a certain sales goal, your BI system can analyze previous months of data and suggest a reasonable goal based on past performance.
Business Analytics applies to companies that see future growth and productivity as their main goals. BA gives you the tools to process data, answer the question to ‘why’, and create future actionable items. You can apply business analytics across all verticals of a business. It can be applied to marketing, finance, CRM, Human Resource Management, and even manufacturing.