Scribd
Upload
25 views

BA Vs BI

Business analytics (BA) uses statistical analysis and predictive modeling to draw insights from company data to improve business planning and performance, whereas business intelligence (BI) provides methods for accessing and exploring organizational data to better understand business operations and make more informed decisions. While BA and BI can be used interchangeably, BA focuses more on predicting the future through trends and modeling, while BI is more descriptive, focusing on analyzing historical and current data. There is no clear consensus on where the lines are drawn between BA and BI.

Uploaded by

Arwin Somo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
25 views

BA Vs BI

Business analytics (BA) uses statistical analysis and predictive modeling to draw insights from company data to improve business planning and performance, whereas business intelligence (BI) provides methods for accessing and exploring organizational data to better understand business operations and make more informed decisions. While BA and BI can be used interchangeably, BA focuses more on predicting the future through trends and modeling, while BI is more descriptive, focusing on analyzing historical and current data. There is no clear consensus on where the lines are drawn between BA and BI.

Uploaded by

Arwin Somo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

ddThis Sharing Buttons

Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to LinkedInShare to SlackShare to EmailShare to WhatsApp

For your business to thrive, you need to know what’s working, what’s not, and
how to improve. That much is obvious. But figuring out how to go about it?
That’s the tricky part.

The sheer quantity and scope of data produced and stored by your company
can make it incredibly hard to peer through the number-fog to pick out the
details you need. This is where Business Analytics (BA) and Business
Intelligence (BI) come in: both provide methods and tools for handling and
making sense of the data at your disposal.

What’s In a Name?
Here’s where it gets tricky. BA and BI are broad terms covering all kinds of
technologies and approaches – and, to add to the confusion, are often used
interchangeably.

So…what is the difference between business intelligence and business


analytics? Is there a difference at all?

Let’s take a closer look.

What Does “Business Analytics” Mean?


BA is a catch-all expression for approaches and technologies you can use to
access and explore your company’s data, with a view to drawing out new,
useful insights to improve business planning and boost future performance.
Typically, this involves using statistical analysis and predictive modeling to
establish trends, figuring out why things are happening, and making an
educated guess about how things will pan out in the future.

What About “Business Intelligence”?


BI is also about accessing and exploring your organization’s data. And, again,
the ultimate goals are to better understand how the business is doing, make
better-informed decisions that improve performance, and create new strategic
opportunities for growth.

But on the whole, BI is more concerned with the whats and the hows than the
whys.

BI lets you apply chosen metrics to potentially huge, unstructured datasets,


and covers querying, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP), and
reporting as well as business performance monitoring, predictive and
prescriptive analytics.

In other words, both BI and BA are tackling the same problems, but if you’re
working with masses of raw data, you want extensive control over how you
use that data, and you want to draw out your own interpretations and
conclusions from the numbers, the tools and techniques you use will likely fall
under BI, rather than BA.

The Great Debate


Case closed, right? Unfortunately not: there’s no real consensus on exactly
what constitutes BI and what constitutes BA, or where the lines are drawn.

Predictive vs Descriptive
One way to look at this is that BI tells you what happened, or is happening
right now in your business – it describes the situation to you. Not only that, a
good BI platform describes this to you in real-time in as much granular,
forensic detail you need.
So, BI deals with historical data leading right up to the present, and what you
do with that information is up to you. Ideally, you’ll learn from past mistakes,
build on past successes, and feed this into your decision-making going
forward, replicating what works and changing what doesn’t. But
fundamentally, your expertise and judgment are crucial.

BA primarily predicts what will happen in the future. It combines advanced


statistical analysis and predictive modeling to give you an idea of what to
expect so that you can anticipate developments or make changes now to
improve outcomes.

Both approaches are valuable, just in different ways. It’s important to know
whether you are more in need of descriptive analysis, predictive analysis, or
both before you invest in a platform.

For example, it’s great to have a way to generate predictions about future
growth, but if you can’t drill down into the underlying data to understand the
basis for these predictions or tweak your dashboards to give you exactly the
insights you need, you may be limited in your business planning.

You might also like