Business Analytics – What is Business Analytics Carol Hargreaves

Interest in Business Analytics is growing each day. Many still do not understand the difference between Business Analytics & Business Intelligence. There is quite a big difference between the two.

Business Intelligence is your dashboards, reporting tools, etc that allow you to see how the company is doing in meeting its KPIs or to see how the company is doing now compared with last week or last year this time. Business Intelligence is a summary of how your company is doing usually presented visually using pie charts, bar charts or trend charts.

Say for example your reporting system presents your sales this week as an upward trend. Business Intelligence tells you your sales is increasing but, does not tell you why it is increasing. Secondly, when seeing your Business Intelligent information, your action is likely to be reactive.

On the other hand, Business Analytics allows you to model your sales and better understand why your sales is trending up. Using models such as the logistic regression or decision tree, you are better able to understand what is driving your sales. And, in turn, you may act proactively and do more of “what is driving your sales”. Business Analytics allows you to be proactive and hence gain competitive advantage over your competitors.