BI And Analytics: Understanding The Differences

You must have heard about Business Intelligence and Business analytics. Many times we often cannot distinguish as we are unaware of some of the major differences. Business intelligence can be an advanced method or application to collect, integrate, and examine business data. While, Business Analytics is understanding the data, analyzing, collecting insights, processing, and more.

Despite the similarities between data analytics and business intelligence their roles and responsibilities are different. In this article, we will learn more about BI and analytics.

Table of Contents

BI And Analytics: Key Takeaways

BI and analytics provide insights that help businesses take important decisions.
Both BI and analytics collect, interpret, and process large amounts of data from various sources.
BI and analytics use various tools to convert raw data into actionable insights such as data mining, data visualization, and predictive analytics.
Business analytics deals with predictive as well as prescriptive analytics.
Business intelligence deals with predictive analytics mainly.

Definition of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a broader concept in the modern business landscape. It refers to the processes, technologies, and advanced tools that organizations use to collect, analyze, and present business information and data.

The major objective of business intelligence is to help organizations make better and more informed decisions with more insights based on data. The primary focus of business intelligence is on descriptive analytics where historical or already available data is analysed to get a clear understanding of what happened in the past.

Major Functions of Business Intelligence

Some major functions of Business Intelligence are listed below.

Data Collection and Aggregation: Gathering data from various sources, such as external and internal databases, real-time data streams, and more.
Data Warehousing: Storing the data in a centralized location for easy access. It generally deals with storing and organizing large volumes of data in a repository known as a data warehouse.
Reporting: Generating static reports and dashboards that summarize historical data.
Data Visualization: Presenting data in visual formats such as charts, graphs, and dashboards for easy interpretation and identify trends.
Performance Management: Align Business processes and tools with planned strategies to monitor overall business performance.

The major function of business intelligence is to make important decisions. The outcome is used to support people having managerial roles such as research analysts and managers. It is a method of converting raw data into meaningful and useful insights for analysis propose.

Some of the tools used to improve business decisions are data management, data visualization, predictive modeling, data mining, forecasting, simulation, and more.

Definition of Business Analytics

Business Analytics combines business in data analytics used for the advancement, and investigation of past performances of an organization. Available data is collected, processed, and analyzed in a business to build strategies and future plans.

Business analytics deals with predictive analytics where future outcomes are predicted and decisions are taken accordingly. It also deals with prescriptive analytics where actions are recommended based on the data insights.

Major Functions of Business Analytics

Analytics plays a major role in business with insights and useful information derived from the available data. It is the process of transforming data into insights to improve decision-making.

Statistical Analysis: Using statistical methods to identify patterns and correlations in the data.
Predictive Modeling: Using historical data to build models that predict future outcomes.
Optimization: Recommending optimal actions based on data analysis.
Data Mining: Discovering patterns and relationships in large datasets.

The basic purpose Business analytics is to provide actionable insights that can help organizations optimize their strategies and operations, anticipate, trends and make proactive decisions.

Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

BI and Analytics share many resemblances however they share some major differences which are important to be noted. Both bi and analytics focus on providing insights that can help managers and research analysts make better decisions.

Business Intelligence	Business Analytics
Business intelligence is a more traditional approach that involves the usage of data to manage day-to-day operational management inside the business.	Business analytics is a more statistical and formulated field where data analysts and experts use quantitative tools to make important decisions and predict future strategies for growth.
Analyses available historical data to drive current business needs.	Analyses past data insights to drive current and future business needs.
Business intelligence deals with collecting, interpreting, and managing current operations within a company.	Business analytics deals with managing future operations along with current needs.
It uses descriptive analytics to understand past and present data.	It uses descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to understand past data, predict future trends, and recommend optimized actions.
Frequent tools used in business intelligence are Tableau, Power BI, QlikView, IBM Cognos, Analytics, etc.	Frequent tools used in Business Analytics are R, Python, SAS, IBM SPSS, Apache Hadoop, etc
Managers and leaders in an organization use business intelligence to collect updates and data from the current processes, maximize workflow, and produce informative insights to achieve business goals.	Business analytics not only tell about the current performance but also tell them more about their future customers.

Business Intelligence Vs. Business Analytics

It is important to consider several key differences that exist when we talk about bi and analytics. Considering market trends, job growth, size, and age of organizations, and whether or not they are concerned about future changes and outcomes.

Business analytics is a newer concept and a trendier job position than business intelligence. Based on surveys you will find more searches for business analytics as compared to business intelligence. This surge in business analytics might be due to rapid growth in data science and analytics.

As per many recent surveys, it is said that the demand for an expert professional might increase by 40% in the coming years.

The size of an organization is an important factor for businesses to decide whether they employ Business intelligence or business analysts. Business intelligence deals with the current operations and managing workflow in an organization to help them reach their goal. While in business analytics we often talk about recent market trends and future predictions to optimize processes accordingly.

Career Opportunities in BI And Analytics

Career opportunities in BI and analytics depend upon various factors with salary differences not being very noticeable, other aspects must be kept in mind while choosing your career in business analytics or business intelligence. In many companies, position overlap is common when we talk about business analytics or business intelligence personnel jobs and responsibilities.

However, ultimately it comes to how much you learn and grow as in the future you will be able to make informed decisions based on your insights and experience.

Business intelligence analysts are often used by companies to improve their decision making, workflow, and meet organization objectives.
Analysts make the best use of available organizational data as well as market trends to maximize business profit.
Becoming a business intelligence analyst is a good choice because it has a high potential for growth and lucrative salaries.
Business intelligence analysts often get promoted to higher-level jobs within a few years including roles such as analytics manager, business intelligence manager, business analytics manager, and business intelligence architect.

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BI And Analytics FAQs

Q1. Is BI and Analytics the same thing?

Ans: Business analytics and intelligence are somehow similar in their major function of collecting, interpreting, processing, and optimizing data insights to present them in a descriptive and defined manner. However, business intelligence is limited to current needs and business analytics is limited to current as well as future needs.

Q2. Who earns more a BI or a BA?

Ans: The average salaries of business intelligence personnel and business analytics are not much different however, business intelligence salaries are slightly higher than analytics based on many factors. The differences go out of notice with work experience and the working company.

Q3. Which is better Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?

Ans: Business analytics provide more room for growth and opportunities as almost all businesses integrate business analytics at some level. However, business intelligence is generally considered in major firms where a large volume of data is interpreted and processed daily.

Q4. Is BI in demand?

Ans: Most businesses and organizations use a high volume of data to interpret and make important decisions. BI and analytics create ample job opportunities with job security but you need to master relevant tools and technologies to grab opportunities and grow.