Difference between business intelligence and predictive analytics

When it comes to handling, sorting, and understanding the data at your disposal, both business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics provide tools and techniques to enhance productivity and deliver products at the right time. While businesses have been using BI to make better business decisions, predictive analytics has remained less common. Let’s explore the difference between BI and predictive analytics and how both can be used to bring additional value to your business objectives.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies and tools that transforms data into actionable insights to help influence an organization’s strategic business decisions.BI tools often refer to various tools that analyze and present data into simple formats that anyone from executives to end-users can understand. This data can be presented as reports, graphs, charts, dashboards, summaries and more. This information retrieved provides insights into an organization’s current state.

What is predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics is a branch of business analytics that analyzes a company’s historical and current data to make predictions about future events. It encompasses various statistical techniques from data mining to machine learning to determine patterns and identify risks and opportunities. Instead of just relying on what has occurred, it uses existing statistics and presents a robust evaluation of future outcomes.

Differences between business intelligence and predictive analytics?

Serve different purposes

Organizations use traditional business intelligence to gain historical data for reporting purposes. This data allows different departments to extract the required data to evaluate past occurrences. On the other hand, predictive analysis uses forecasting to assist in solving business environment problems. It uses descriptive analytics and predictive data mining to deliver better information about the business and lead to better decision-making.

Different methods

BI’s existence relies on retrieving and analyzing data and reporting it in formats that make sense to the end-user. It uses specific metrics focused on past business performances. In contrast, predictive data analytics predict future events by analyzing raw data patterns that may be more difficult to detect.

Unique analysis process

With company analytics, the analysis process is based on reporting models that pull company-related data to evaluate past performances. Because these historical reports provide no real insights for the future, predictive analytics will drill down to obtain the necessary data. By making a query, a set of analyzes will be performed using statistical, quantitative data, algorithms and provide useful insights into the original query.

XRM Vision: Explore the difference between business intelligence and predictive analytics

Organizations can enhance their productivity and business revenue by gathering the correct data by using the proper business analytics tools. If you’re curious about learning more about the difference between business intelligence and predictive analytics, or business analytics in general, contact XRM Vision today. We will provide you with all the information you need.