Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics: Which One Is More Preferable?

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Here’s a concise study on why Business Intelligence and Business Analytics is beneficial for organizations, and which one is more preferable?

Specifically, IT initiatives that stage the processes on a podium are all muddled, confused, mixed-up, and interchangeable. Mismatching of concepts, overlapping ideas, interweaving with each other, remain quite distinct. In short, these terms open up the organization to possibilities that were not there before. It becomes so important to understand the nuances, purpose, specifics, and value of each concept to fetch the real meaning of the world of big data.

International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts the global revenue for Artificial Intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, to grow from a mere $19.6% to $432.8% (in billions). Also, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for global BDA spending over the 2021-2025 forecast period will be 12.8%.

business intelligence vs business analytics

(Source)

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence can provide comprehensive business metrics, in near – real-time to support better decision making.

Business Intelligence provides helpful reports on the past and current state of business. BI tells you that sales of your software have spiked in (city) the past three weeks. As a result, you decide to make more software to keep up with demand. Business Analytics asks, “Why did sales of software spike in (city)?”

Business Intelligence (BI) is used in sales, marketing, finance, operations department. Tasks revolving around this domain include quantitative analysis, measuring performance against business goals, gathering customer insights, and sharing data to identify new opportunities.

Where is BI used?

  • Data Scientists and Analytics – Business Intelligence and Business Analytics work in unison. They pair up to offer opportunities and strategic recommendations for the business.
  • Finance – Business Intelligence blends data with operations, marketing, and sales data to find what users think.
  • Marketing – Business Intelligence tools provide real-time campaign tracking, measure performance, and plan for future campaigns.
  • Sales – BI can help monitor revenue targets, sales rep performance along with the status of the sales pipeline using a dashboard with reports and data visualizations.
  • Operations – BI saves time, resources by letting managers analyze and access data.

Popular BI Software

  • Birst
  • SAP BusinessObjects mobile
  • Yellowfin
  • Zoho Reports
  • Tableau Software
  • Bime
  • Trackerbird Software Analytics
  • Jaspersoft BI Suite
  • Pentaho Business Analytics
  • Yurbi

Benefits of BI

BI makes information visually appealing, and insightful. It provides a holistic business view. Data-informed improvements in various business functions like marketing, finance, sales, operations, finance, support, HR, and customer care. Such tools improve system performance so enterprises can distribute more information to targeted users faster.

It offers highly insightful, accurate, relevant, customizable reports in real-time, key performance indicators (KPIs) to make better decisions. It helps companies identify issues, operations, sales, and increase revenue.

BI can be used to recognize behaviour while regularly tracking worker contributions and improvements via Reporting and dashboard, data analytics, BPM, Ad Hock Query, Data Hierarchy, Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Multi-Dimensional Analytics, ODBC, ODS, OLAP.

BI tools can analyze discrepancies, inefficiencies, errors, and increase profit margins by providing insights that lead to future sales and guide where to spend future budgets.

Business Intelligence App Use Cases

Expedia: They had piles of unstructured and unused data which was difficult to sort and analyze. Business Intelligence helped analyze that customer data from across the company and link the results with objectives directly related to corporate initiatives.

SKF: It required consistent market size and product demand forecasting to adjust its manufacturing. It implemented Business Intelligence to serve as a single source of reliable information.

Stitch Fix: It wanted to reduce returns and keep repeat customers, generate more word-of-mouth business with recommendations from customers. It implemented BI to collect data throughout the buying process, which enables them to offer better styling according to customers’ preferences.

New York Shipping Exchange: It is used to manually extract data from its proprietary applications and various cloud apps and then import it into excel. It took time and effort, and only a few people could access it. BI centralized its data into one system and gave the entire company access so that those with no coding knowledge get to know better.

Univision: It wanted more visibility into its data to unify and focus on targeted ad campaigns. BI helped it obtain more value from its programmatic advertising.

Spear Education: Its phone system was lacking functionality. BI solution helped it maintain more through customer interaction records and provide a complete view of customer interactions.

Sabre Airline Solutions: It needed advanced tools that could provide real-time data on customer behaviour and actions. With BI, Sabre’s executive dashboards provide near real-time insights in user-friendly environments with a 360-degree overview of business health, reservations, ticketing, and operational performance.

Baylis & Harding: It wanted greater visibility for its managers and executives to make sound decisions and expand the business. It now uses BI to create standard and ad hoc reports, custom dashboards with KPIs relevant to their areas of focus and share the goals and performance details with its teams without having to request a custom report from IT.

Cementos Argos: It wanted to improve its decision making, used BI to leverage data, standardize the finance process and applied big data to gain more in-depth insight into customer behaviour to yield a higher profitability level.

Lotte.com: They used insights from the BI analytics program to understand why customers abandon shopping carts.

Business Analytics

What does Business Analytics do better? It focuses on identifying operational insights, overall operations of the business. Business Analysts deal with less technical stuff and more with the practical applications of data insights. They are not data analysts.

Data Analytics imbibes many electives like machine learning (Data Science), Strategic Marketing (Business Analytics), and/or data warehousing (Business Intelligence).

BI has turned around from being an IT-specific function to a business function. It assimilates business analytics, data management tools, an interactive dashboard with data visualization reporting tools, performance management, quick information access,

Analytics can take many forms from being occasional contributions to primary focus.

  • For an Analyst, it can be – Deep dive analysis, metric development
  • For an Engineer, it can be – Infrastructure and tools, data engineering, data modelling
  • For a Visualizer, it can be – Analytic tools, Deep dive analysis

Business Analytics Benefits

  • To check if the content was paused, rewound, fast-forwarded or re-watched
  • To check content abandonment times and rates
  • To check browsing and scrolling behaviour
  • To check personalized video ranking
  • To check to trend now ranker
  • To check Continued watching ranker
  • To check video-video similarity ranker

Business Analytics App Use Cases

Netflix aimed to achieve 100 million subscribers when it was launched in India five years ago. It remains stationary at just 5.5 million. Research and consulting firm Media Partners Asia, Disney Plus Hotstar, and Amazon Prime Video are far ahead with 50 million and 16 million subscribers in India, respectively.

According to Reed Hastings, Chief executive of Netflix, “The platform is doing great in other major global markets, but not finding any luck in India. This case persists even after spending $400 million during 2019-20 on local productions.”

Reasons for such issues revolve around pricing, distribution and lack of shows in regional languages. Some current and past employees also say that Netflix failed to decide on its target audience here. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Video had been succeeding Disney Plus Hotstar and Netflix in streaming more content in regional languages. Alternatively, Disney Plus Hotstar has gained high viewership from a diverse audience by airing IPL and soap operas. Netflix shares have plunged 37% since the beginning of 2022.

What went wrong with Netflix’s strategy? What did Amazon Prime Video and Disney Hotstar do better?

Advanced data and analytics provide users with personalized movie and TV show recommendations, predict the popularity of original content before advertising it, customize marketing content such as trailers and thumbnail images, optimize production planning, and enhance general technical and business decision making.

Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics

Business IntelligenceBusiness Analytics
DefinitionIt analyses past and present to drive current business needs.Analyze past data to drive current business needs.
UsageTo run current business operations.To change business operations and improve productivity.
Ease of OperationsFor current business operations.For future business operations.
ToolsSAP Business Objects, QlikSense, TIBCO, PoweBIWord Processing, Google docs, MS Visio, MS Office Tools
ApplicationsApplies to all large-scale companies to run current business operations.Applies to companies where future growth and productivity are its goals.
FieldComes under business analytics.Contains a data warehouse, information management.

Conclusive

Transforming the experience of business intelligence through mobile technology is helping to drive better, faster decision-making and greater productivity for a growing number of companies. When organizations adopt efficient mobile BI strategies – Employees are more engaged, Customers are more satisfied, Business Thrives (Reports by Aberdeen, Apple.inc, Compass Intelligence, ComputerWorld Inc., Forrester, Gartner, and Visage Mobile)

Digital data enables a panoramic view of many vital business strategies guaranteeing commercial success. Setting off of Cloud and business analytics in the past decade renders a comprehensive perspective of data. Now companies no longer need to rely on guesswork and intuitions. BI and BA tools can collect huge amounts of data, and structure it for better decision making, improving operational efficiencies, growing revenues, gaining competitive advantage, increased employee engagement, faster decision–making, user-friendly interfaces, very easy to use. This means data can be used in sales, finances, internal processes. BI Service tools improve employee productivity, as mobile employees connected 24/7 work an average of 240 hours more a year. To learn more about how we can help you, please schedule a call!

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About Author
Neeti Kotia

Neeti Kotia

Neeti Kotia is a technology journalist who seeks to analyze the advancements and developments in technology that affect our everyday lives. Her articles primarily focus upon the business, social, cultural, and entertainment side of the technology sector.

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