Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) are the infamous data management solutions that are widely being implemented. However, organizations find it increasingly difficult to choose from the options. Mainly, as their key differences are often similar and overwhelming.
Organizations are turning to Business Analytics software and Business Intelligence tools to gain insights from present and historical data, resolve business issues. Also, ensure competitiveness, manage workloads and maintain stable profitability. That being said there is no black and white scenario between BI and BA. There is a grey area. Let’s find out what the difference between them is:
Business Intelligence
Everything in BI is about tools, infrastructure, applications, and their best practices. Organizations want to access and enable access to information and its analysis for optimizing and improving decision making and performance.
Whether it is a remote location or the main HQ, organizations demand well-informed and time-efficient decision making, regardless of the mix of applications, platforms, environment, infrastructure, etc. All the enterprises look for scalable and modular business intelligence tools that are easily deployed in any kind of environment and the ones that can deliver services all across the enterprise.
The main feature of BI is to derive insights, to showcase data visualizations and graphical presentations, to assist the users in comprehending the data quickly and more efficiently. To explore more details from the data, visualizations help in breaking down the patterns and outlines the processed data to demonstrate changes and identify trends.
The other features include:
• Reporting enables the user to present an easy to read format of the information coming from one or more data sources. BI reporting is essential for users to stay informed and get their queries lined up at regular intervals. Keeping everyone in the organization in a loop is mandatory to stay ahead of information, with the help of BI you can create pixel-perfect, interactive, robust dashboards and manage the information to thousands of users on the web, print or mobile devices.
• Visualize, manipulate and model data to assist in better decision making. Data analysis helps users to spot trends and generate insights. Exploring data against other data source to identify issues.
• With the use of dashboards, users can make their product more competitive and valuable. Combining data with dashboards help the users in gaining insights on their data: historical or real-time, track KPIs, understand the state of business and act quickly on it.
BI benefits the enterprises in transforming their data and empower everyone with quick insights. With the features of BI, one can discover trends and get the knowledge of how their business is performing, with a clear overview of what risks and opportunities are emerging. This enables organizations to take fast data-driven decisions, on the go. From a fact-based data process, that collaborates information, you can now stop relying on your intuition and make informed business decisions. BI enables everyone in an organization to visualize and get their answers from the data all by themselves.
Business Analytics
Business Analytics is everything about making informed decisions. For making decisions, users need data. The more data there is, the better decision you can make. That is what holds the truth for all businesses. However, data alone is not the answer to making informed decisions. Organizations have data, all of it, structured and unstructured. BA allows organizations to analyze the data.
A statistical analysis of data is accumulated to make decisions. If history is any evidence, businesses made decisions based on guesswork, gut feelings, and intuitions. But as the competition and effectiveness in the market rise amongst competitors and emerging technology. An evidence-based decision is what helps a business to succeed and operate efficiently.
Data-driven decision making allows businesses to simplify their process and get results based on facts and historical patterns. With the business analytics software, organizations can predict their outcomes, and determine whether their past decisions were correct and analyze the likeliness of the result for the future. This way is prepared for the results and make fact-based decisions.
BA is the subset of BI, and its primary goal is to get actionable data. It is often used to clarify old data, past events, get a perspective from the raw data. BA creates predictions through reports and strategies. It is descriptive and typically focuses on patterns to help determine the best course of action for the future and assist the organizations to maximize their business outcomes.
To engineer the data-driven issues, BA uses quantitative analysis, raw data, mathematical models and expands the knowledge of complex data sets through artificial intelligence and neural networks to exactly predict market trends, consumer actions, future events, etc. and directs the users towards the desired outcome.
BI (or) BA. What’s better for you?
BI helps you move towards an operational business intelligence model and optimizes your data for current needs. It tells you what is currently happening in your business, and describes the situation to you. BI deals with historical data right until the present, and what you do with that data is completely up to you. With BI, a company’s expertise and judgment are crucial.
BA, however, predicts what will happen in the future. It uses predictive modeling to give businesses an idea of what could happen in the future so that they can anticipate and improve outcomes.
Conclusion
It is a prerequisite for organizations to manage their data and not consider data and content as the same. Many companies are looking for a suitable data management tool for their integrated enterprise approach. It is your prerogative to determine if you need the solution for now or for the future. Both BI and BA bring different values to the table but in different ways. It is up to the businesses to gauge whether they need predictive analysis, descriptive analysis or both before they invest.
If you are a company which relies on real-time reporting, BI is your answer but if you are a company that intends to change your business model, BA is your best option.
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