All along till now, Organizations were using business intelligence to get the information from the vast amount of data buried into various internal systems. But this is just information & decision makers had the reactive approach to deal with such situations e.g. North region is not meeting the revenue targets – so create some focused program to cover North region & so on.
This is where Business Analytics play !! Its not reporting of past data or what is happening now, but giving organizations the forward look at the business.
It can answers questions like :
- how do we get more insights about our customers?
- what if we change the price or service of the products ?
- what will be the impact on our customers ?
- How do we target our most profitable customers?
- How do we detect frauds ?
- which of the customers are likely to leave us in future?
Business Analytics is an extremely important area going across all the business domains. If you know in advance, which of the customers are likely to leave you, you can take measures to hit only those customers with right campaigns to retain them. there is no need for machine gun firing but a sniper is required in this case.
By looking at the future, Organizations can take proactive decisions and plan their business for maximum success.
So Business Intelligence can give you “Information” but Business Analytics gives you the “Knowledge” – TO ACT UPON !!!
In the next post I will talk about What is Business Analytics & its various components.
