Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics: What's the Difference?

Learn about the differences between Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA). Understand how they are used for data management and how they help companies make better decisions.

Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics: What's the Difference?

When it comes to data management, it's essential to understand the distinction between business intelligence and business analytics. While both are used to analyze data, they have different objectives and use different techniques. Business intelligence (BI) is a set of tools, technologies, and practices used to collect, analyze, and report data across an organization. It helps to formulate better decisions and to prepare accordingly.

BI collects data and creates visualizations that allow interpretation. These visualizations help stakeholders to see past trends and to make decisions based on them. On the other hand, business analysis is mainly based on predictive analysis. It identifies patterns in business data, suggests why things are happening, and forecasts the likelihood of future events.

Its objective is to predict future events based on what has already happened. Business analytics (BA) is a subset of BI that uses statistical and mathematical techniques to analyze large data sets from which a company can extract significant information. The main difference between business intelligence and business analytics is that business intelligence focuses on descriptive analysis, while business analytics focuses on predictive analysis. In reality, a company needs both business intelligence and business analysis, descriptive and predictive analysis to be successful.

Business intelligence can be done using software, hardware, or other methods, but you don't need coding knowledge to perform business intelligence. You can create performance benchmarks, detect market trends, increase compliance, and improve almost every aspect of your business with better business intelligence. To do this, they create models based on available data and predict the results of different scenarios. The objective of BI is to collect, report and monitor relevant data, while that of business analytics is to find actionable information and predict future results.

In today's business world, it's essential to be able to act quickly and make decisions that keep your business moving forward. Start your selection project with a free, pre-designed and customizable business phone system requirements template. On the contrary, business analysis refers to the processes that are used to apply data-based information to make decisions or take action.