Business Intelligence Vs Data Analytics: What Is What?

Muhammad Ahasn Zulfiqar   May 30, 2024  7:56 a.m.

It won’t be an exaggeration if I say the world is powered by data—it is powered by data. Today, we have more data than we have ever had, and it is helping us in all ways to shape a better world. Be it government and public sector, or private sector industries such as manufacturing, retail, life sciences, and oil and gas, data and data-backed intelligence are driving the world’s growth in various forms, chiefly by leveraging the data to make better decisions. But here’s the thing. Just having heaps and volumes of data is not enough. It must be usable and be utilized to make the most of it. To do that, two terms come to mind: Business Intelligence and Data Analytics. And while these two terms are a great way to get the most out of the data and are very often interchangeably used by many, they both greatly differ in their applications. Both data analytics and business intelligence (BI) depend on data, but they are not the same (we’ll see through the differences later in this blog). In today’s blog, we dive deep into BI and data analytics and everything you need to know to develop a decent understanding of these technologies. Let’s get going.

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business Intelligence is a system that helps businesses make informed decisions by applying various techniques to analyze the business data available. BI is a collection of practices that includes data collection, sorting, analysis, integration, and presentation to make sense of the data yielded from business operations. BI or Business Intelligence enables organizations to provide extensive information, including metrics, in real-time to assist business decision-making at multiple levels. Through BI’s incredible capabilities, companies can identify trends, develop, and track performance indicators, and ensure better compliance for organizations with varying needs and requirements. Moreover, data analysis, market trends study, and data visualization techniques are all powered by Business Intelligence. All in all, BI is among those transformative technologies that can help businesses of all sizes have enough data to analyze the data and use it to accelerate their growth.

How does BI work?

Understanding the basics of Business Intelligence is not as simple and straightforward in the beginning, however, it is necessary for most modern businesses to develop an understanding of how BI works. Business Intelligence, or BI, in simple words, is a process that mines gold from raw data. Let me explain what that means. Imagine you have data arriving from diverse sources—customer interactions, sales figures, market trends, all sorts of data—being shaped and refined into meaningful insights that fuel strategic business decisions. Through various information accumulation and visualization techniques, BI uses the data, processes it, and turns the complex language of data into compelling, actionable insights that can guide businesses through stormy waters. BI empowers businesses to anticipate needs and navigate future challenges with precision in advance, ensuring that every data point adds up to the success of the organization. To further the understanding of Business Intelligence, it is crucial to understand its core components. At its foundation lies data warehousing, which acts as a secure storage repository that acts as the central storage of an organization’s historical data. A data warehouse (DWH) is used to create a single source of truth, allowing easy access to the data for reporting and various other uses. Next is data mining, where sophisticated algorithms play detective, unveiling hidden patterns and correlations that human analysts might overlook. Then there’s OLAP, or Online Analytical Processing technique, which allows for the dynamic examination of data from multiple perspectives, offering a multidimensional view that is critical for in-depth analysis. Last but not least, reporting and querying software provides the tools for businesses to ask complex questions and receive clear answers, thereby enabling informed decision-making. BI does not just equip organizations with a rearview mirror to understand where they have been but also lights the path to where they need to be.