Difference Between Business Intelligence and Data analytics
Business Intelligence deals with complex strategies and technologies that help end-users in analyzing the data and perform decision-making activities to grow their business. BI plays a key role in business data management and performance management. Data analytics, on the other hand, is implemented to convert the raw or unstructured data into a user understandable meaningful data format. The transformed information can be utilized to cleanse, transform or model the data to support the process of decision making, derive conclusions and implement predictive analytics.
Head to Head Comparison Between Business Intelligence vs Data analytics (Infographics)
Below is the Top 5 Comparision Between Business Intelligence vs Data analytics
Key Differences between Business Intelligence vs Data analytics
- The earliest usage of Business Intelligence was discovered in the ‘Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business Anecdote book’ written by Richard Miller Devens in 1865. Devens uses the term BI (Business Intelligence) to describe how a banker named Sir Henry Furness, has gained profit by analyzing his own environment to stay ahead of his competitors.
- Data Analytics or Business Analytics is a process that helps the enterprise users to transform the raw or unstructured data into a meaningful format. Data Analytics is a standard or common process that is employed under various procedures or strategies by many organizations around the globe depending upon their business needs.
- Business Intelligence is implemented across many organizations to enhance their decision-making capabilities, analyze the business data, perform data mining, develop reports and improve operational capabilities. BI is implemented only on historical data stored in the Data Mart or Data warehouses. Some of the business operations such as cleansing the data, modeling the data, transforming the data and forecast future trends of data are the key aspects of implementing data analytics.
- Data Analytics is implemented in a situation where an organization is relatively new and needs significant changes to its business model. Data Analytics helps the business users in analyzing the historical data, current data and predicting future trends to make the right changes in the proposed business model. Business Intelligence, on the other hand, is implemented in a situation where an organization doesn’t have any changes to its current business model and its prime purpose is to meet organizational goals. BI helps users to identify the loopholes in managing the data and rectifies them by providing efficient decision-making scenarios.
- Reporting is a key feature that can be implemented with the help of Business Intelligence and Data Analytic tools. But, the reporting or visualizations developed vary based on the type of business data and business scenarios. If there is a business scenario, where the client needs to deal with current day market trends and generate ad-hoc reports then data analytics would be the right option. Data Analytics can also be preferred, when there is a need for business to forecast future trends of data based on the past data. Else, if there is a situation where the client needs to handle the data stored in a data warehouse and generate reports by pulling the data from the warehouse then Business Intelligence would be the right option, Business Intelligence can also be preferred, when there is a need for business to track the targeted sales delivery or organize data to provide sales intelligence.
Business Intelligence vs Data analytics Comparision Table
Basis of Comparison |
Business Intelligence |
Data analytics |
Origin | The term Business Intelligence has come into existence in 1865 describing about its importance, through a book by an author named Richard Miller Devens. | Data analytics has been around since19th century, but it has grown its prominence in 1960’s with the invention of computers. |
Scope/ Meaning | Business Intelligence refers to the information required to enhance business decision-making activities.
|
Data Analytics refers to modifying the raw data into a meaningful format. |
Functionality | The prime purpose of business intelligence is to provide support in decision making and help the organizations to grow their business. | The prime purpose of data analytics is to model, cleanse, predict and transform the data as per the business needs. |
Implementation | Business Intelligence can be implemented using various BI tools available in the market. BI is implemented only on Historical data stored in data warehouses or data marts.
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Data analytics can be implemented using various data storage tools available in the market. Data analytics can also be implemented using BI tools but it depends on the approach or strategy designed by an organization. |
Debugging methods | BI mechanism can be debugged only through historical data provided and the end user requirements. | Data Analytics can be debugged via the proposed model to convert the data into a meaningful format. |
Conclusion – Business Intelligence vs Data analytics
In conclusion, we have seen the origins, head to head comparisons and some key differences between Business Intelligence and Data analytics. Considering the current day technology market trends there has been an evolution in developing business intelligence and data analytic tools. Modern-day Business Intelligence tools are equipped with data analytics option as well and it really depends on the enterprise users to make a right choice based on their business scenarios. Going by the current data trends both Business Intelligence and Data Analytics have a key role to play in the business growth. Necessary research is being carried out by the business on both BI and data analytics to help them serve their purpose in an efficient way.
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