What is the Difference Between Business Analysts and Business Intelligence?

A business analyst has always been a diverse role yet only for someone who possesses extremely strong analytical skills who is able to understand financial management, customer relationship management, business analytics, and the workflow of a company.

In traditional setups the business analyst used to go through the entire systems or processes of a company utilizing business analytics, comparing them with current management solutions to see if they provide valuable insights and the company is heading in the right direction while deciding on the future course for the business.

A business analyst is required to have exceptional communication skills so as to be able to properly gather information across all departments and comprehend the workflow properly, only then is he able to provide actionable insights to the management regarding future decisions. It is much easier for technological systems to look at large numbers of predictive analyses than humans can look at.

In essence business intelligence is now able to perform those tasks by looking at self-generated statistical analysis and deciding the best practices for the company, by looking at the data at hand.

Business intelligence uses software and technological innovations to utilize the entire data available to a business running statistical analysis on the historical data and real-time analysis on current data simultaneously to provide best management solutions and advice to management from the data that is currently available to the business.

Business Intelligence alone is just the raw data that is being computed on a traditional basis that the system was taught to do without consistent innovation. This includes recording the entire raw data available from the business operations. Business analytics is able to answer the how and whys that can drive innovation for the future. Business analytics focuses more on predictive analytics whereas business intelligence focuses on descriptive analytics.

To give a clear example of the difference between the two, for example, you are an online store that sells sports merchandise and you can see that your sales spike in the month of June every year. Utilizing business intelligence tools you will be able to forecast the right amount of inventory required to make sure you can continue to ship orders at the right time and avoid negative reviews.

In the case of business analytics, you can use different advanced modeling techniques to figure out the spike in sales in June. Using data mining or AI you can figure out if the spike is due to a specific periodic event or help figure out if the only reason you experience a spike in sales is if your inventory is mismatched and you stock summer gear that is only sold in those months.

This can help you predict future needs and allow for an entire business process revamp by getting newer successful products in your inventory.

 A data analyst is someone whose role revolves around identifying and remedying the problems being faced in the business processes using statistical analysis with the help of data analytical tools available to provide meaningful insights to the decision services. The main purpose of a data analyst is to break down complex issues at hand using quantitative analysis.

A business intelligence analyst on the other hand focuses on descriptive analysis making use of data warehousing and business intelligence tools to try to provide management solutions. Such an analyst would be looking to make the business more intelligent by going about it with an approach based on evidence from the data at hand.

A business in itself is loosely defined as any legal person or entity that is actively involved in commercial or professional services but what is business intelligence and how are analytics used across varying companies?

Analytics is the analysis using technology that is mostly computer programs for computing data or stats. Analytics basically relies on multiple attributes. How much data information is coming in. How big the sample set is it being acquired from. What are the factors affecting the sample set and how efficiently can the data be quantified. All of this in turn allows for better predictive measures to be set for the success of a business.

Business Intelligence focuses primarily on storing the past and the current data and using BI tools to make sure that the business is operating most efficiently and make insightful decisions backed by evidence on how the company should be run. With a higher focus on reporting functions.

Business analytics involves looking at the bigger picture. Business analytics involves data mining, statistical analysis, and predictive modeling. Where the system should be able to predict future outcomes and how businesses can decrease loss and increase.

According to Payscale, Pay for entry-Level IT Business Analysts sits in the ballpark of $62K per year.

Business analysts usually end up making slightly more than an average data analyst.

This is due to the fact that the job description of an average data analyst revolves around looking at technical information and being able to provide the best technical expertise out of it.

However, business analysts are required to possess a medium-range diverse skill set that includes communication skills, technical skills, management skills, and analytical skills. However, there is not much growth and the job is not so fast-paced as it is for data analysts as they move towards the technical side they are able to cash out much bigger paychecks by working directly with the system as a data scientist.

In 2017 Gartner Inc estimated the global market of business analytics and intelligence to be $22.8 Billion. As of 2020, we can see that it reached $22.16 Billion and is estimated to reach $42.95 Billion by 2028.  

Business Intelligence and business analytics are way too tightly knitted down to be replaced by each other. If we look at the latest artificial intelligence techniques that are being employed for data analytics they have in turn taken a lot of the manual work for business intelligence and automated it to the point where supervision is not required. The future of business intelligence is rooted in more companies using data to drive decisions and more elaborate BI tools and visualizations coming to the market.

However, we personally think that business analytics will grow exponentially with the growth in technological innovation. The advanced modeling techniques used will most probably be self generated by the systems themselves in the future. However, for providing the best advice to management, the role of business analysts is secure for some time to be.