Can you explain the difference between business intelligence and analytics if they put you on the spot? The experts aren’t in agreement either, so don’t worry if you need clarification on the specifics! Business intelligence and analytics are inextricably intertwined in their approach to resolving business issues, providing insights from past and present data, and defining future decisions. Conversely, BI is more focused on the present moment of data, making decisions based on current insights. At the same time, BA focuses on predictive modeling and advanced statistics to determine what will happen in the future. Let’s see what experts say and how we can connect and differentiate them. Business Intelligence and Business Analytics have already proven beneficial this year. Discover what makes them different and how they complement each other by digging more profound now.
How Do The Experts Feel?
Better Buys asked seven different business intelligence pros how they distinguish business intelligence from analytics in an article on BI and Business Analytics. There were different perspectives from each professional. These are a few of their opinions: It takes Business Intelligence to run a business while Business Analytics to change it.” – Pat Roche, Vice President of Engineering at Magnitude Software. “BI is looking backward and using historical data. BigData-Startups is looking ahead at what is coming.” – Mark van Rijmenam, CEO / Founder.
Is there a difference between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence? Everyone indeed has an opinion, but nobody knows. I wouldn’t worry about it.” – Timo Elliot, SAP Innovation Evangelist. What if you care about the difference between business intelligence and data analytics? It would help if you used both when making decisions that will affect you in the long or short run, regardless of whether you run a small business or an enterprise. By combining BI and BA, an organization will have a holistic view of the raw data and be able to make more cost-effective and successful decisions.
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
Companies and enterprises use business intelligence and analytics to collect historical and present data, analyze basic information using statistics, and deliver insights for better decision-making. Both terms provide insights into the business operation and future decisions, but how they do it and what information they provide differs.
No single “correct” definition of what makes one term different from the other. There is evidence of that in the varying opinions offered by the experts. Therefore, let’s distinguish between the two straightforwardly so that you can use them to help you in your work instead of trying to find “the right” answer. Business intelligence and data analytics are fundamentally different in two ways:
- Is it the past, or is it the future? In which direction are we going in time?
- Were we concerned with the events, how they took place, or why they took place?
We have simplified the definitions of business intelligence vs. business analytics for you here, considering this is purely a matter of opinion.
Business intelligence (BI) – This field specializes in identifying and analyzing what happened in the past leading up to the present and how it occurred. This model aims to identify significant trends and patterns without diving too much into the why’s or trying to predict what will happen in the future. Click Here
Business analytics (BA) aims to understand why something happened in the past to improve the future. There is a breakdown of contributing factors and causality in the report. As a result of these why’s, it also makes predictions about what will happen in the future based on these why’s.
Football’s Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics
Let’s say that you are a coach on the staff of a football team, and you want to review the most recent game your team played. By doing this, you can identify how to fix your errors and replicate your successes in the future.
Using our previous definitions of BI, we can define it as identifying all the statistics and plays that contributed to your team’s victory. You could locate that you kept the ball longer than your opponents. As a result, you can also identify the trend that your right side of the field was a crucial factor in retaining possession due to excellent passing on that side.
BA would be more concerned with why you controlled the ball for longer than your opponent and why your right side did so well passing.
Is it because of the following:
- The defenders of your opponent on that side of the field were weaker players than the defenders of your opponent on the other side?
- Are your right-side players putting in more time on the field with each other than those on your left side?
- Could one of your players on the right have a phenomenal performance that carried over to the rest of the side?
It is essential to ask these questions. As a result, they allow you to identify ways in which you can replicate your success or prevent your failure in the future. If you ask the right questions, the right business intelligence questions will lead you to better analytics. A business dashboard lets you organize all your information in one place, making meaningful decisions easier. However, we need to analyze the difference more to understand what to do in a company’s operation process and how to choose the best tool.
Business Intelligence vs. Data Analytics is essential; without further ado, let’s dig deeper into the topic.
How Does Business Intelligence Differ From Business Analytics:
In this post’s introduction, I mentioned that there needs to be a clear distinction between Business Intelligence and Business Analysis. Even though the two terms are often used interchangeably, a few elements distinguish them. Each of them deserves a closer look, so I would like to examine them one at a time.
Bi & ba: How Do They Work?
This post will examine BI and BA from a business perspective with use cases and examples. But first, let’s look at the distinction between correlation and causation.
Causation Isn’t Causation:
The correlation between two things means that when one happens, the other tends to coincide when the first one appears. A causal relationship describes how two things are connected in such a way that one causes the other to happen either or as a result of the other.
The most famous example of the difference is the correlation between ice cream consumption and the rate of homicide in a city. Of course, ice cream does not lead to the murder of people, nor does it cause people to kill one another. Therefore, it is clear that there is not a causal relationship between the two.
This correlation is significant because when the temperatures rise in the late summer, homicide rates tend to increase as well. The theory goes that warmer weather allows more people to be outside. This, in turn, leads to more social interaction, some of which may lead to violence.
What You See Isn’t Always True
There are examples of people confusing correlation with causation everywhere you look. A muscular person always giving you workout advice at the gym, for example, may or may need to learn about what they are talking about when they say they know what they are talking about. While it may correlate with knowing a muscular person, the advice they’re giving you may not make you an athletic person. In other words, they may bless with good genetics that makes them stand out. They are likely muscular not because of their knowledge but because they lack it.
As a light-hearted side note, there are several hilarious examples of things correlating with each other that do not have a causal relationship. On the website Spurious Correlations, many of these correlations are displayed. The divorce rate in Maine is closely related to the consumption of margarine per capita. Should married couples switch to butter instead of margarine to lower the divorce rate?
Depending on the field, it can be challenging to separate correlation from causation. There are often extensive and expensive research trials to find causal relationships. The butterfly effect is another famous example. Our focus will be more on business, so we will examine and Provide insights on the correlation and causation between business intelligence and the data analytics world.
What is the Business Impact?
Is it possible to understand the factors that cause your business success or failure rather than just those associated with it? You can predict what will happen next in your marketplace if you do. Before you can know causation, you need to know what’s correlated with something. If we are to make any reasonable inference as to how things happened (BA), we need to: you must know what happened and how it happened (BI).
That’s the difference between business intelligence & analytics; both are crucial. Like two jigsaw puzzle pieces, they fit together to make your business more profitable. The definition and use of KPI examples are essential To establish a business goal and compare business analytics and business intelligence. The more you dig into data analysis tools, the more sense it makes to develop qualified insights and make better decisions. Understanding the difference between business intelligence and business analytics allows a company to adjust its operations cost-effectively and insightfully. You will be more competitive using both to create a successful business intelligence strategy.
Scenarios of BI and BA use cases?
That’s all I have to say about the metaphors and descriptions. Some business examples illustrate the difference between business intelligence and business analytics.
You work for a marketing firm that helps large e-commerce companies launch new products using business intelligence and analytics. To figure out which new products are most likely to succeed (analytics), figure out the following:
- What were the most successful products in the past (BI), and why did they succeed
- Seasonal trends that have been influential on the success of past launches (BI)
- The reasons why customers bought past successful products (BA)
Let’s say, for example, that your hypothetical e-commerce store sells women’s boutique fashion on its website. You must work with your retail analytics team to know what products will work for your business.
First, you should look at the clothing categories that drive the most profits for your business. You can examine when each successful product was launched throughout the year. Last but not least, you could conduct an in-depth customer interview to find out why customers liked those pieces or categories.
The likelihood of new products succeeding is predicted accurately if you do enough market research and have a large enough sample size.
Your customers often think differently about your products, which could lead to surprises in how you feel about them.
Analytics and BI dismantle assumptions:
Perhaps you assumed that your customers cared primarily about the price point of your clothing.
Your research found that your customers would spend more on your products if you emphasized humane sourcing practices, such as not using sweatshops.
Instead of worrying so much about the prices of your garments when launching a new product, you would focus on using that positioning in your marketing messages.
This example illustrates one of the fundamental principles of business intelligence and analytics. Many of your assumptions about your organization, customers, marketplace, and products are incorrect – or, at the very least, incomplete. If you ask the right questions, analytics are here to help. Whether you are in healthcare or financial business intelligence, BI and BA are crucial to success.
Analyses And Business Intelligence
To demonstrate the value of both terms, let’s look at a few real-life industries where the difference between them is evident.
Where can I find recruiters?
Employee engagement, overtime hours, training costs, overall productivity, cost per hire, recruiting conversion rate, time to fill a position, retention efficiency, part-time employees, etc., are all part of Human Resources. Establishing HR KPIs for your business means digging deeper into what happened, how, and why it happened (BI) to understand better how to perform in the future. Let’s have a quick look at a simple dashboard and see how the performance of business analytics compared to business intelligence differs based on a single full-scale dashboard. Read More
It provides a simple yet effective overview of a company’s recruitment process. An HR manager or professional can use it to define upcoming decisions and decrease costs using a recruiting agency or in-house. Your goal is to find the most cost-effective recruitment approach. For example, you want to define what happened during the recruiting process, how it happened (BI), and why it happened as you see it (BA).
It took longer than planned for a department to fill a position. You can inspect more and see that the conversion rate of the recruiting professionals did not go as expected, and you’ve lost time and resources keeping up with the market (you’ve connected your historical data to the present moment and found out that resources are lost). The average costs of hiring will help you identify recruiting cycle patterns. Data visualization tools can help you gain insights into these data and reduce the time it takes to get those insights.
Here, we can define what happened, how, and why. Make your HR report to demonstrate business intelligence vs. analytics power. To consider future endeavors, you must understand the influences on your operations and know what happened, how it happened, and why. A successful business has this holistic formula.