The difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
So, what is analytics? a leading market research and management consulting firm, has said that, “the proper term for interacting with information at the speed of business, analyzing and discovering and following through with the appropriate action, is ‘analytics’.” CIOs often assume that business analytics (BA) comes along with Business Intelligence BI. The traditional BI market has been associated with providing executive dashboards and reporting to monitor the assumptions and key performance metrics that are part of long term planning cycles.
Dashboards
Everybody wants a dashboard. To the extent that all of us are CEO’s of our own business discipline, we want a simple measurement display of how we are doing and an alert mechanism of when something goes wrong. Additionally, dashboards address the growing urgency around Sarbanes Oxley. Monitoring planning assumptions and key performance metrics has now become mission critical from a regulatory and compliance standpoint.
Where BI Stops and BA Begins
But BI reporting ends with the dashboard, which is sufficient only for some business planning, and BA picks up the rest for the Go-To Guys. Simply, this group must interact with data in a much different way from what traditional BI allows. The Go-To Guys deal daily in unanticipated outcomes and unknown results and it is their job to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunities. Leading edge tools such as Tableau can help bridge this gap