Many think that business Analysis and Business Analytics are the same. But they are not. Let’s find out what is the difference between Business Analysis and Business Analytics.
Business Analysis is defined as the discipline of recognizing business needs and identifying solutions to business problems. The business analyst makes sure that the service or product provided by the technical team meets the client’s requirements. The solutions provided a systems development component or can also be organizational change, process improvement or strategic planning and policy development.
Business Analytics refers to the investigation of past business performance using collection of tools, techniques and skills. It helps to gain insights of future performance and ideally it focus mostly on data and statistical analyses.
| Business Analysis | Business Analytics |
| Primary focus on processes, techniques and functions | Primary focus is on data and statistical analysis |
| It is used to solve complex business problems and give efficient solutions | It is used to predict future states and drive business decisions |
| Functional, business and domain knowledge is required to for analyzing business requirement. | This requires statistical, mathematical and programming knowledge for performing business analytics |
| It assists to improve performance by standardizing various processes. | The process lead to findings, which helps into further improvement opportunities. |
| Defining and standardizing business processes across the business units for a company. | Making a dashboard to track the main performance metrics using statistical methods to predict future sales based on past sales |
Many peoples’ answers have a different opinion, some say that Business Analysis is based on Business Analytics, which means, collecting data, also called analytics, to analyze. Both the terms sound similar but they are different. They differ in terms of process and requirement.
To know more about the difference between business analyst and data analyst click here.