Big data is transforming decision-making everywhere. From large organizations to higher education and government agencies, data from many sources is helping organizations boost sales, expand their reach, operate more efficiently, and quickly launch new products or services.
To draw insights from all this worthy data and use it to be more competitive, organizations must apply both data analytics and business analytics. There’s often confusion about these two areas, which can look interchangeable. In this article, we’ll examine the goals of each function and compare roles and responsibilities to help you choose which path is right for you.
Business Analytics vs. Data Analytics: An Overview
Business and data analytics include working with and manipulating data, deriving insights from data, and utilizing that information to enhance business performance. So, what are the significant differences between these two functions?
Business analytics concentrates on the larger business implications of data and the actions that should result from them, such as whether an organization should develop a new product line or prioritize one project over another. Business analytics refers to a combination of tools, skills, and applications that enables businesses to measure and improve the potent of core business functions such as customer service, sales, marketing, or IT.
Data analytics involves scouring through large datasets to reveal patterns and trends, draw conclusions about hypotheses, and advance business decisions with data-based insights. Data analysis tries to answer questions like, “What is the probability that a customer will leave a competitor?” or “What is the influence of seasonal or geography circumstances on customer preferences?”.
The actual practice of data analytics comprises several methods and approaches and is additionally referred to as data mining, data science, data modeling, or big data analytics.
What is Business Analytics?
Business analytics (BA) is the repetitive exploration of a company’s data, focusing on applying statistical analysis methods to reveal information that can help drive innovation and financial performance. Analytics-driven companies use big data as an essential corporate asset that fuels business planning and promotes future strategies. Business analytics helps them in getting maximum value from these valuable insights.
Business analytics can be easily achieved in any department, from sales to customer service to product development, thanks to Deck It’s readily available tools with intuitive interfaces and deep integration with many data sources. Many of these solutions let users apply advanced analytic models without the help of a data scientist, creating new opportunities to discover hidden insights in large datasets.
Business analytics needs adequate volumes of high-quality data, so organizations looking to get accurate outcomes must integrate and harmonize data across different systems, then decide what subsets of data to make available to the business.
What is Data Analytics?
Data analytics is the process of gathering and examining raw data in order to conclude it. Every business collects enormous data for market research, sales figures, logistics, or transactional data. The real value of data analysis lies in its ability to identify patterns in a dataset that may indicate risks, trends, or opportunities.
Data analytics enables organizations to modify their processes based on these learnings and help in making better decisions. This could simply mean deciding what new products to launch in the market, building strategies to retain valuable customers, or analyzing the effectiveness of new medical treatments.
One of today’s most beloved and recognizable forms of data analytics is ML (Machine Learning). It processes extensive volumes of data and reveals patterns within that data to make intelligent predictions and provide unique insights that answer a precise business question or solve a specific business problem.
Data analysis is more technical than business analytics and demands the use of advanced analytics tools. It is crucial for improving organizational or operational efficiencies and developing strategies to seize new business opportunities.
Business Analytics vs. Data Analytics: A Comparison
Many people accept that data and business analytics share the same goal of implementing technology and data to improve business performance. In a data-driven world where the volume of data available to organizations continues to grow exponentially, the two functions can even work in tandem to maximize efficiency, reveal valuable insights, and help businesses succeed.
This side-by-side comparison will help clear up some of the confusion between business and data analytics.
| Business Analytics | Data Analytics | |
| Goal | Centers around identifying trends in the organization that can be optimized to improve overall business planning and performance.
Support continuous improvement in technology and processes. Seek to arrive at a single version of the truth. |
Benefits come from recognizing patterns in a dataset and making accurate predictions based on events. |
| Approach | Involves defining goals and requirements for programs and projects.
More retrospective and description. |
Typically, more predictive and prescription.
Strives to answer specific questions and discover new insights for competitive advantage. |
| Data | Data sources are set in advance based on project goals. | Analysis is more ad hoc, with data sources added on the fly as correlations are uncovered. |
| Team Members | CDO, CIO, analytics manager, business analyst, data warehouse engineer | Data analyst, line of business manager |
Getting Started with Business or Data Analytics
From early startups to well-established global organizations, every company should leverage data for innovation and business growth. The practices of data and business analytics share a common goal of optimizing data to gain efficiency and solve problems, however, with some fundamental differences.
Whichever path you choose, you’ll have to collect relevant, trusted data from many sources quickly, easily, and securely. Deck IT’s BI and analytics solutions help organizations understand the current prevailing trends, precisely predict possible future outcomes and prepare plans to handle the situations.
We use the latest next-gen technologies to help design business intelligence and data analytics solutions that help organizations increase their ROI by gaining insights about their business, products, customers, and markets.
Because when you’re confident in the quality of your data, your stakeholders will be confident that they’re making the right business decisions every time.
Get in touch with our Business and data analytics experts today!