What Is the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics?

Ever wonder what is the difference between business intelligence and business analytics? How do you differentiate between the two? Let's find out.

It's easy to believe that rendering the best service to customers sets you apart from your competition and brings in income. The truth, however, is that every business needs data to provide the necessary services to thrive. From the inception of your business, you're going to create an overwhelming amount and variety of data. This raw data needs to be managed and analyzed into actionable insights to help you identify problems, make smarter decisions, and ultimately help your company become more profitable. To work with data, you'll need to employ data analytics and business intelligence (BI), two highly effective data management solutions. What are they, and how do they differ? Continue reading to find out more.

Business Intelligence VS Business Analytics

Business Intelligence Definition

Business intelligence is a data management solution that's of great importance to many businesses worldwide. It's a process whereby raw data is collected, stored, and thoroughly analyzed. The data is collected from your daily business operations, and it undergoes all these processes to provide all business stakeholders with comprehensive metrics for better decision-making. All data analyzed is reported in real-time, which means you're always up to date on any changes occurring in your operations. With BI software or BI applications, you can spot market trends, create performance benchmarks, increase business compliance, and improve all other aspects of your business.

Business Analytics Definition

Business analytics is easily defined as a subset of business intelligence. It's a process where varying technologies and strategies are employed to extract and explore all insights concerning raw data collected from your business operations. The data usually covers past and current performance, which are both compared and contrasted to identify changes and shortcomings that need to be rectified for a successful business future.

Main Differences Between the Two

The debate about business intelligence vs business analytics has been around for quite some time. While both processes use your organization's data to yield results, they both possess striking differences that set them apart. Some main differences between the two concepts are explained below.

Operations

The major difference between BI and business analytics is the questions they help you answer when concerning your business. While business intelligence focuses on descriptive analysis, business analytics focuses on predictive analysis. Business intelligence tools analyze both your past and present data to help you operate your current business as efficiently as possible. This is descriptive analysis, and it answers the questions of "what" and "how" to know what does and doesn't work.

For business analytics, past data is analyzed to better analyze the current scenario, which will help you create effective strategies for your future operations. This is predictive analysis, and it uses data mining, machine learning, and modelling to answer the question "why."

Output

Business analytics is a process that emphasizes the use of multiple tools, performing varying operational applications related to your metadata. On the other hand, business intelligence often concentrates on the report of analyzed data only.

Scale

In the grand scheme of things, business analytics can be described as a huge umbrella under which you'll find data management solutions such as business intelligence, information management, data warehousing, enterprise applications, and governance, as well as security and risk compliances.

Technicality

You will need some form of software application knowledge and analysis tools to carry out any data-related tasks under business analytics. However, for business intelligence, the automation offers you a user interface dashboard that carries out any data analysis or operations.

Tool Examples

Some of the tools employed by business intelligence platforms include SAP business objects, TIBCO, PowerBI, and Qliksense. Business analytics tools include Word processing, MS Visio, MS Office Tools, Google Docs, and many more.