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Business Analytics (BA) refers to the continuous investigation and exploration of past business performance to drive business planning through data visualization and operational awareness. Unlike business intelligence (BI), which uses specific metrics to measure a business's past performance and guide future planning, BA discovers and creates the predictive models based in data science that business intelligence ultimately uses.
Business analytics focuses on observation and understanding, developing important insight into business performance based on data and statistical analysis. BA uses all manner of data and statistical methods, including analytical modeling, numerical analysis, and predictive modeling, Uses for extensive BA vary from insights for human decision-making to prompting fully automated decision-making technology.
Business analytics can be used to address questions like why a specific action is continually happening and what if this trend continues. BA can then predict what could happen if things change or don't change, and determine what the best outcome involves.
Business analytics depends on very high volumes of quality data, often requiring the use of big data technologies (i.e. the organizing and storing of an extremely large amount of data) to analyze the data and inform business decisions. Small samples of data or relative or approximate data can skew results significantly, effectively changing potential outcomes and future planning to catastrophic degrees.
BA integrated services can deliver end-to-end expertise with industry-leading reporting tools, and aid customers in realizing significant business benefits such as increases in accuracy and productivity, faster turnaround times, and lower both risk levels and cost per report. The capabilities of BA and BI include data and system analytics and reporting, and dashboards and scorecards, providing full-service enterprise reporting, analysis, support, migrations, and upgrades to meet all of a business's operational and strategic demands.