Refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. It focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. While business intelligence (BI) focuses on a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning, business analytics is focused on developing new insights and understanding based on statistical methods and predictive modeling.
Furthermore, while BI methods such as querying, reporting, OLAP, and alert tools answer questions such as: – What happened? – How many? – How often? – Where is the problem? – What actions are needed?
Business analytics can address questions like: – Why is this happening? – What if these trends continue? – What will happen next? – How can we optimize?