Did you know that 45% of businesses in the United States fail within their first 5 years? If you are currently looking at your business analytics to help you understand if you are in the green or the red, you might be using the words business intelligence and business analytics interchangeably. If so, we are here to teach you more about what each one is so that you can learn how they can help your business thrive.
Keep reading to learn the ins and outs of both business analytics and business intelligence.
What Is Business Analytics?
This is when you look at your company’s data and use it to anticipate trends in the future along with the outcomes. This includes using predictive modeling and statistical analysis to make informed decisions for your business.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is used to maintain, streamline, and optimize current operations. This really helps an organization improve its operational efficiency and helps it increase its productivity.
Main Difference
The biggest difference between both is that business analytics focuses on predictive analysis. This means that by using data mining and machine learning you can determine the likelihood of future outcomes. Business analytics answers the question of “why” to help make an educated prediction about what will happen.
Business intelligence focuses on descriptive analysis which gives a summary of present data and historical data to show what is currently happening or what is going to happen. The questions that business intelligence answers are “how” and “what.”
Example of Both
To make it easier to understand and see the difference this example will help:
Let’s say you sell worker’s compensation insurance online. Business analytics will be able to answer a question like “Why did sales of worker’s comp insurance spike in a certain state?”
You are able to mine your website data to figure out things like most of your website traffic comes from a certain city thanks to a business with a high influence that recommended your company for their worker’s comp needs. With this information, you might decide to offer other prominent businesses throughout the United States your services for an honest review.
Business intelligence, on the other hand, will give you reports of the current and past state of your worker’s comp business. It will show you that there was a spike in a certain state in the last month instead of why the spike happened.
By the way, if you want to learn more about getting rid of the headache of worker’s comp do not miss this webinar that will help you save time and money.
Ready to Level Up Your Business?
We hope that now that you are aware of the main differences between business analytics and business intelligence, you can use the information above to level up your own business.
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Andrea Parker is a reporter for Zobuz. She previously worked at Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. Andrea is based in NYC and covers issues affecting her city. In addition to her severe coffee addiction, she’s a Netflix enthusiast, a red wine drinker, and a voracious reader.
