In this modern world, everything is evolving day by day. Businesses also take part in this evolution where it’s getting incorporated with new technologies and data analysis to support the decisions taken for the business.
The two blooming concepts in business are business intelligence and business analytics. As the name suggests, business intelligence is something that is related to being more intelligent to make decisions for the business. And Business analytics is used to analyze business by quantifying things to make meaningful decisions.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
As the name suggests Business Intelligence(BI) means being more intelligent about the business, it helps to analyze and filter for the smooth functioning of the organization. BI includes all types of software to report, monitor, and create a dashboard, event management to increase the productivity of the organization. The main objective of business intelligence in business is, it helps to find out new strategies for the organization, to find out new opportunities and it also assists the business in launching new products.
Business intelligence mainly focuses on the past and present condition of the company to come to a decision. BI combines both the internal and external data to conclude which helps to get a whole picture about the organization, and it is more effective than analyzing a single data. The demand for business intelligence is mainly in between the large-scale business because they are more interested in increasing the workflow and productivity with the existing performance of the company. The reason why business intelligence is very popular is that it is user-friendly (dashboards) so that it is very easy and understandable in all levels of management. The BI mainly deals with the structured data of the business from the applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial software applications. BI uses different techniques and methods for analyzing data like OAP (Online Analytical Processing), dashboarding, data reporting, mapping analysis, etc. The companies are hiring those who are capable of making important decisions, to maximize the workflow and who can create informative reports for this post.
BUSINESS ANALYTICS
Business analytics is a statistical technology to gain insights for the future gain of the organization. As the name suggests it is more on analytical aspects of the company. There are various tools for analyzing the aspects such as predictive analysis, forecast analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, etc. These analyses will be an added advantage for the future growth of the company. All these aspects make it clear for the business that there is a huge gap in the industry related to data analytics. So, there is a tremendous increase in hiring data analysts in the industry.
The reason why business analytics is very popular is that the BA will be able to analyze the weak points of the business and will provide insights to improve them. BA focuses on the prediction of analysis of the future growth of the company rather than the past or existing performance. Business analytics are more familiar with small-scale businesses because small-scale businesses are very eager to know about the future and to work for the success of the business in the future to establish their enterprises more efficiently. Business analytics is not user-friendly as compared to business intelligence because in business analytics the analyst will be using a lot of tools and software applications to carry out the work. Business analytics will use both structured and semi-structured data to provide insights to support the decision of the organization. BA uses different analytical methods like data modeling, predictive analysis, requirement analysis, etc.
Which is best BI or BA?
Both Business analytics and Business intelligence play a dominant role in the business. There is nothing like one is more prominent than the other. Both of them have their characters and roles to play in the business. Business intelligence is used by the companies to analyze the existing performance of the company, to understand the work process of the business, and to build a good relationship with the employees of an organization. Whereas, business analytics deals with analyzing the data to look upon the current market trends and to analyze the past performance of the business to predict the future performance of the business. Therefore, there is no importance in saying that neither business intelligence nor business analytics is best for organizations. Both play their role in the organizations and they cannot be replaced by one another.
Arjun Ranjith
II MBA, DSCE
