Data Analytics: At its core, business intelligence focuses on descriptive and diagnostic analytics that answer questions about where the business has been, where it is now, and why it is where it is today. BI tools must be able to retrieve data from data stores to perform these different types of analysis.
Data Reporting: All our data and analytics are useless if they don’t get to decision makers and other stakeholders. BI needs to communicate data and insights in a way that people with less context can immediately understand and use to make decisions. To complete these steps, you will need to use multiple tools and products. There are two subgroups of tools to consider:
One class of tools is those used to collect and store data. Tools like Salesforce and Hubspot collect data about different aspects of a company’s visitors. Products like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake allow companies to store the data in a scalable data warehouse. And other products like Fivetran and Stitch make it easy to connect data generators to data stores.
Products that collect and store data are a critical part of the BI process, but they’re not typically what people think of when it comes to business intelligence. Focusing on this part of a company’s data strategy can help with other parts of your data analytics plan, not just your business intelligence needs. Instead, the strategy that companies use to collect and store data is often called a data pipeline. The tools used in a data pipeline fall under the umbrella of data engineering.
Other tools are used for data analysis and reporting. These are products called business intelligence tools. These BI tools can be set up to connect to data stores and run queries to analyze the data. This can be used to create visualizations and dashboards that are easy to read and understand. A good BI tool also allows you to create reports and send them to stakeholders so they can monitor performance metrics at a high level.
The term “Business Analytics” (BA) is a term related to Business Intelligence. There is a lot of confusion about where the two terms overlap. The general difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics lies in the type of data analysis performed.
