Many people would like to know the difference between business analysis and business analytics ?
So what is the difference between the two job disciplines ?
But first of all, what is Business Analysis ?
A Business analyst is anybody who enables change in an organization by defining the business needs and recommending solutions that would deliver value to the stakeholders.
Example of Business Analysis jobs include Business Analysts, Business System Analysts, Functional Analysts, Business Process Analysts, Process Analysts and Web Analysts.
Now let us define who are Business Analytic professional is :
A Business Analytic professional uses technology to build analytical models and simulations to create scenarios that are used to predict future business operations events.
Example of Business Analytics jobs include Data Analysts, Business Intelligence Analysts and Data Scientists.
So what are the differences between the two job disciplines ?
Some of the job functions that a Business Analyst performs include the following :
- Business case creation.
- Elicit requirements.
- Document those requirements.
- Verify and validate those requirements.
While some of the job functions that a Business Analytics professional performs include the following :
- Used data and statistical analysis to analyze the current state and predict the future states.
- Uses the analyzed data to creates reports and dashboards that are used to drive business decisions
- Requires some statistical, mathematical and programming knowledge.
So while both disciplines might involve the analysis of organizational processes but Business Analytics requires additional statistical, mathematical and programming knowledge.