Do you know the difference between business intelligence (BI) and advanced data analytics? Both methods can help your company to gain deeper insights from your operational data, but one is based on things that happened in the past while the other is focused on the future of business intelligence.
This blog will help you distinguish between the two terms and understand how both approaches can be used to improve data insights for more effective decision making within your business.
Learn from the past using business intelligence
You can use business intelligence to identify something that happened in the past and work out why it happened.
BI uses structured data (meaning data that’s organised, formatted and easily searchable in relational databases) to analyse past business performance. This intelligence can then be used to manage and improve current operations, and help you understand the need of business intelligence in difficult times.
When you think of business intelligence tools, you probably imagine highly sophisticated systems that process data analytics and monitor your business operations. While this is correct, it’s worth pointing out that simple spreadsheets can also be considered business intelligence tools – although they are no longer a viable option in today’s data-driven business world.
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The right business intelligence tools will provide you with a broad range of business metrics that can be delivered in real-time. The resulting data and reports will provide deeper insights to analyse what happened in the past and explain why it happened. You will be able to identify any deviations from expected results and calculate the cost to your business.
The good news is you can then use this valuable data from the past to improve current business decision making and better manage any challenges that crop up within your organisation and/or industry.
Use advanced data analytics to predict the future
Unlike business intelligence which uses past data, advanced data analytics focuses on predicting future events by applying new modelling techniques to discover new and unforeseen patterns in your data. BI is all about reporting and querying, whereas advanced data analytics seeks to optimise, correlate and predict the next best (or the most likely) action.
The type of data used is also a key differentiator:
- Business intelligence tools use structured data that is captured via consistent metrics
- Advanced data analytics uses both structured and unstructured data.
Unstructured data can be text files, video, audio, and a whole host of other formats. It has no predefined data model, meaning it needs to be transformed before it can be analysed.
Advanced analytics tools can transform and analyse unstructured data, enabling organisations to identify why something is happening and what will happen if the trend continues, including what will happen next and what the best outcome will be. Being able to predict the future in this way will give your business a significant competitive advantage.
Advanced data analytics techniques
Here are some of the most popular techniques:
Unlock the true value of your data
Dufrain’s business intelligence and data analytics solutions will enable you to make better business decisions.
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Contact us to discuss your BI & data analytics requirements
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