In today’s data obsessed world, several new tools and technologies are being embraced to unearth insights from data. From big data to business intelligence, machine learning to advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and more. Although all these concepts offer a range of benefits, business intelligence and advanced analytics are two complex but interesting topics that are often used interchangeably. Read this blog to explore these technologies and learn more about the difference between BI and Advanced Analytics.
In a world where data has become a differentiating factor for business excellence, business intelligence enhances the decision-making ability of companies. By making meaningful use of data collected from business operations on a day-to-day basis, it assists them in enhancing their performance, exploring new opportunities, identifying threats, and unearthing new insights to speed up the decision-making process.
Advanced analytics, on the other hand, helps answer complex and challenging business questions while helping boost operational efficiency, drive investment decisions, and augment improve customer experiences. By using sophisticated modeling techniques, it goes a step ahead of business intelligence to predict future events and discover trends/patterns which cannot be detected otherwise.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is defined as, “a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information which helps executives, managers, and other corporate end users make informed business decisions.” Using a wide variety of tools, applications, and methodologies, it enables organizations to collect data from within (or outside) the organization, prepare it for analysis, and run queries against that data to create reports, dashboards, and data visualizations for enhanced decision-making.
What are the Benefits of Business Intelligence?
Using business intelligence, companies can:
- Consolidate data from different sources to enhance efficiency and business performance
- Get historical, current, and predictive views of business operations to spot inefficient processes, identify new opportunities, and manage operations better
- Deliver actionable intelligence for better decision-making and business transformation
What is Advanced Analytics?
Advanced analytics is defined as, “a category of inquiry that can be used to forecast future events and predict the effect of potential changes in business strategies through what-if analyses.” Using sophisticated data exploration tools and techniques, it helps discover meaningful patterns in structured and unstructured data, make predictions about what is likely to happen in the future and generate recommendations.
Benefits of Advanced Analytics
Using Advanced Analytics, companies can:
- Predict future business trends, carry out what-if analysis, and suggest the next best action
- Monitor business operations to improve efficiency and protect revenue at a more granular level
- Analyze metrics and data related to different business processes, improve performance, and streamline costs
- What is the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics?
Business intelligence and advanced analytics empower organizations to make more informed, data-driven decisions. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, there are several differences between the two.
How does Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics work together?
Business intelligence and advanced analytics focus on improving business decision-making and follow similar processes of collecting and analyzing data and deriving insights. They help identify areas where businesses are not operating at peak efficiency and aid in improving performance of operations. In addition, both the concepts help big data to be presented in a way that enables quick and easy visualization.
When used together, business intelligence and advanced analytics can help organizations in not only understanding what has happened in the past, but also why it happened, and what can be done to improve future outcomes. Together, they can help businesses in analyzing past performance, making correlations, and suggesting the next best action for improved business performance – across operations, sales, maintenance, employee satisfaction, and customer experience.
Transform your Company with Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics
Since several years ago, businesses have been embracing all sorts of data analytics tools to make sense of the growing volumes of data. As enhancing business decision-making becomes critically important, the realm of business intelligence and advanced analytics is helping teams to collect and analyze historical data, ask questions, identify meaningful patterns, and understand what is likely to happen in the future. If you are looking to enhance the accuracy and timeliness of your decisions, it is time to embrace these technologies and transform how you operate your business.
