What is BI?
Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable intelligence that informs an organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.
How does BI differ from BA?
Business intelligence is also called descriptive analytics, in that it describes a past or current state. “It doesn’t tell you what to do; it tells you what was and what is,” says Michael F. Gorman, professor of operations management and decision science at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
Compare that explanation of BI with the definition for business analytics (BA), a technology-aided process by which software analyzes data to predict what will happen (predictive analytics) or what could happen by taking a certain approach (prescriptive analytics). BA is also sometimes called advanced analytics.
by Mary K. Pratt
