If you earned the Google Data Analytics Certificate or have experience working with data, you probably know that data analytics and business intelligence have both similarities and differences. In many ways, BI builds on tasks that data analysts perform. Often, data analysts are the stakeholders for whom BI professionals develop systems. In this reading, you’ll compare and contrast DA and BI to explore more about these similarities and differences.
| Data tasks | DA | BI |
|---|---|---|
| Involvement | The first step of the data analysis cycle is to define the business problem and establish stakeholder expectations. | In addition to defining business problems and asking questions to establish expectations, BI professionals observe current processes to determine how they can be improved to align more with stakeholder needs. |
| Answering questions | Data analysts are often tasked with deciding what data they need to answer their stakeholders’ questions and gathering that data for use. | BI professionals evaluate the data needs of their stakeholders, identify necessary sources, and design pipeline systems that automatically and continuously gather that data for stakeholders to access. |
| Gathering data | Once data has been gathered, data analysts must ensure that it is clean and ready for use. They also perform transformations on the data to prepare it for analysis. | BI professionals build tools that clean and transform data automatically within a pipeline so that these processes occur to all data being ingested by the pipeline process. |
| Storage systems | Data analysts must adhere to organization conventions and store historical data for analysis. | BI professionals develop storage systems that allow intake from multiple source systems into a destination database, while governing the database schema and optimizing the system. |
| Descriptive and predictive analytics | Data analysis focuses on descriptive analysis that describes historical trends. | BI uses analysis of historical trends to perform predictive analytics that enable organizations to determine likely future trends and act accordingly. |
| Presenting insights | After analysis, data analysts present their findings to inform the stakeholders’ ultimate decision. | BI analysts create tables, reports, and dashboards that empower stakeholders with access to the data they need to inform their whole decision-making process. |
| Iteration | After the initial analysis, data analysts may repeat their analysis based on their findings or new information. | BI analysts continue to iterate on processes to improve and optimize the systems and tools they have built to ensure they continue to be useful for stakeholders. |
DA and BI share a lot of common ground: They are both fields in which professionals use data to create insights that inform decision-making. But BI is more focused on creating processes and information channels that transform relevant data into actionable insights that are easily available to decision-makers on a continual basis.
Source: Google Business Intelligence Course- Coursera
