Every day your company generates tons of information. The history of your relationships with customers, completed orders, clients’ feedback, leads and opportunities — are only a few examples of what you have to deal with every day. Besides, there are dozens of external factors having a significant impact on your company. Changes in the economic environment or seasonal demand for certain groups of goods are aspects that you can barely influence. Nonetheless, you can’t underestimate them if you want to ensure that your organization is evolving and prospering.
The need to track all these and many other indicators leads to additional complications and gives new possibilities. For example, to keep your information safe and easy to access, you must invest in reliable local or cloud storage. On the other hand, careful analysis of this info can help you develop a new vision and lower the probability of risks. Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) are solutions allowing you to benefit from using the info you have gathered and turning it into an effective plan of improving your business processes. Today, we’ll learn their main features to understand better which of them can handle your current problems and help plan ahead.
Clarifying Your Company’s Current State
Business Intelligence allows representing all collected info in a way allowing to interpret it without any significant issues and extracting essential insights from it. The skillful application of Business Intelligence apps will enable you to sort, filter, and categorize chunks of data to build a single picture of how your organization behaves at the moment. Adopting Business Intelligence apps can be a decent choice if you want to optimize workflow, generate regular interactive reports, and better achieve the goals you set for your company.
To extract useful information from big data, you can use a wide range of apps such as Business Intelligence dashboards or operational reports, for example. The exact set of applications that can ensure the optimal outcome strictly depends on the specifics of your company. Therefore, there’s no solution that will help solve the problem of every company in the market. However, there are some common aspects in almost every case.
Screenshot from Hotel Performance Management System Case Study
Data warehouse allows storing the information from different departments and providing centralized access to it. According to the needs of a company, Business Intelligence applications can extract valuable metrics from this data and represent it in an easy-to-understand way. End-users of such systems can generate advanced reports and perform data discovery operations for detecting various patterns and use this info for developing effective development strategies.
Predicting The Outcomes of Your Future Actions
Business Analytics enables the utilization of data for predicting how productive your future actions will be and how they’ll affect you. With this info available, you can enhance its performance and prepare for future changes. Skillful application of business analytics practices is crucial for researching new opportunities, developing reliable strategies for building solid relationships with new customers, and predicting upcoming risks more accurately.
It’s important to note that in this case, the application practice is quite varied. When business owners plan to enter new markets or present new products or services, Business Analytics can be pretty helpful in predicting future customers’ preferences. With this info in mind, it’s easier to prepare an effective promotion plan and define your branding strategy.
How to Choose Between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence
At this point, it may be hard to tell when and how you should implement one of the described approaches. Both of them rely on gathered data and can generate helpful business insights processing it. What may be beneficial — is to remember that Business Intelligence and Business Analytics have different initial purposes and therefore use different tools for formulating the answers. This chapter will talk about the concepts that differ Business Analytics from Business Intelligence to understand which of them is more suitable for you.
First and foremost, you should remember one thing: BI describes, and BA predicts. Suppose you can’t achieve your goals and don’t understand why. A Business Intelligence dashboard can be used for representing raw data as a set of interactive charts and graphs. This info will allow you to find the weak spots and define the optimal strategy for overcoming your issues. Business Analytics can be considered a more complex solution involving data mining and machine learning to predict your actions’ outcomes. Therefore, Business Analytics is an irreplaceable tool for companies that want to make informed decisions and achieve more effective planning.
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Since Business Analytics (BA) deals with more complex concepts, it requires a wide variety of tools performing various operational applications. At the same time, the primary purpose of Business intelligence (BI) is to concentrate on reporting the analyzed raw data. To understand clearly how BI and BA relate to each other, you can think of BI as a subset of tools and methodologies used in a more diverse field of BA. Say, Business Intelligence software solutions can generate reports that Business Analytics platforms can utilize to develop more sophisticated outputs. Business Intelligence works with information “as is” and utilizes a consistent set of metrics. Business Analytics implies that raw data should be transformed into a different form to apply statistical methods further.
It is pretty challenging to say unequivocally whether Business Analytics or Business Intelligence is the best choice for you. Ideally, to ensure your prosperity, you should invest your time and efforts in both approaches. Only in this case, you’ll be able to analyze the impact of your decision on the overall picture. Besides, the variety of methodologies usually used in BI and BA may lead to misinterpretation of terms involved in both of these approaches. Therefore, if you decide that boosting up your business by technological means can be helpful and you’re looking for a reliable partner providing business software development services, the best option for you is not to focus on differences between BI and BA but to concentrate on your current needs instead. Ask yourself who will use the system, what departments of your company struggle the most, and how a software solution can help them. The info you’ll get in the process will help you define whether Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, or a combination of both will have the most significant impact on the success of your business.
Conclusions
Simplifying the big picture, we can say that Business Intelligence enables you to clarify with minimum effort where you are at the moment. Business Analytics helps to clarify how to reach your destination point most efficiently. BI and BA play different roles, but the main goal of applying one of these techniques is to help you efficiently operate within set requirements. Both of them are excellent tools for skyrocketing your productivity. It’s crucial to remember that you must compare the features of your company with the specifics of the application of these methodologies to determine which of them will better suit your needs and expectations.