Thank you for the comment. Some of what you ask about is covered in the above article. Did you have any specific questions?

All the best

Peter

Just a follow-up thought. Possibly worth also reading this.

Peter

Thanks for your post, which certainly ran to more than “a couple of points”!

Perhaps insight versus information is rather splitting hairs. What is information for if not to provide insights?

My central point is nothing to do with whether BI and BA overlap, are subsets of each other, or wholly distinct. It is that it is pretty stupid to claim that BI is useless because it relies on historical data, whereas BA is somehow different as it relies on… er… historical data as well.

Will take a look at your site and see if anything strikes me as interesting.

Peter

1) “Business analytics” can be viewed as a descriptive term (ie: the type of analytics performed by businesses) or a marketing term. “Business intelligence” seems to have lost all meaning as a descriptive term and is used solely as a marketing term. “Business analytics” is still in the process of being defined as a marketing term.

2) Marketing terms get defined differently by each player in the market. Ultimately, a market consensus develops as to the accepted definition of the term, though this definition can change over time.

3) Whether we call it “business analytics”, “decision intelligence” or something else, a consensus is developing that the traditional BI platforms lack a category of capabilities that are being provided by “analytics” vendors.

4) My personal view is that “business intelligence” focuses on tools to provide information, while “business analytics” focuses on tools to provide insight. BI certainly includes some analytic capabilities and business analytics certainly includes some BI capabilities, but this does not negate them being separate categories.

5) As a “visual analysis” vendor focused on the analytics side, we divide end-user interfaces into three groups: reporting, dashboards/scorecards, analysis. While dashboards and scorecards can be viewed as a type of report, the interaction metaphor is distinct enough to consider it separately. Likewise, analytical interfaces use a different interface metaphor than reporting interfaces.

In the market, there are visual analytics vendors like us (Lab Escape), Spotfire and Tableau, collaborative analytics providers like GoodData and Swivel and statistical and predictive analytics providers like SAS and Netezza, which provide a category of capabilities not included in the existing traditional BI packages. The goal of all these vendors is providing the processes and tools to create insight, not simply provide information.

Placing these new capabilities under an umbrella term like “business intelligence” only serves to dilute a term which is muddled enough already. So whether we call it “business analytics” or something else, we need a new term to call these new capabilities.