What is Business Intelligence? Differences between BI & BA

What is Business Intelligence ?

Business Intelligence is basically a collection of various technologies, techniques and applications for your business data. Whatever you can do using MS Excel and Microsoft Power BI is all a part of Business Intelligence.

What is Business Analytics ?

Business Analytics is a part of BI where you analyze the historical data for predicting future events. It includes all the major statistics for predictive analysis and forecasting.

Importance:

Business intelligence is a smart technique used by various business managers, senior corporate executives and various decision makers to take decisions that are highly impactful and growth oriented for the organization.

When to use Business Intelligence and Business Analytics?

It is very important to understand as to when to choose a BI or BA tool which clearly depends on various use cases and business models. Let us find out one by one:

BI Use cases:

BI is an amazing tool for smooth modernized business operations by figuring out inefficiencies and optimizing costs. BI system can provide useful visualizations for all aspects of the business, and self-service BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI, allow the non-technical users within an organization participate in analyzing data.

BA Use cases:

BA is more useful for taking decisions about the changes in operations or for the various products. A predictive model could calculate the optimal times and locations to sell certain products according to the data. It could easily find out the new products that your customers want and the helps in creating and optimizing the strategies to sell them. Such BA practices help in flourishing an enterprise under complex and variable business situations. The self-service BA tools help all of the stakeholders of an organization in deriving some data-driven decisions.

Difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics:

Case study

Let us suppose there is an organization called Omega. Omega has performed quite well for the year 2018-19 by optimizing on their patterns of the last financial year 2017-18 through business analytics. Omega collected all the data of 2017 -18 with business intelligence. Now they are to do some predictive analysis and they discovered the problem pattern in sales of a certain product ‘v’ affecting overall performance. They noticed a pattern of customer buying and figured out the solution for that.

After working on their customer patterns and analyzing it with Business Analytics techniques, they were able to make a significant change in the sales of the next year. Thus, we can notice that Business Analytics is predictive and future focused.

Thanks for reading! We hope you are clear with Business Intelligence and Business Analytics.

About us: EClytics Consulting is a BI consulting company and we provide smart data solutions for your organization and we also provide trainings on Power BI. EClytics will help your business make better decisions by providing expert-level business intelligence (BI) services.