At the SAS Global Forum this week some SAS speakers drew a distinction between Business Intelligence – BI – and Business Analytics. This distinction between Business Intelligence (what everyone else does) and Business Analytics (what SAS does) struck me as a distinction without a difference, as a friend of mine used to say.
As SAS talked about its business analytics framework it became clear that they envision the results of data mining and predictive analytics (where they genuinely have offerings superior to almost everyone) will be delivered in reports or dashboards. This is what I have somewhat dismissively called “predictive reporting” and while it is better than purely historical reporting, it does not do much to make every decision analytically based as it leaves out the decisions made by machines (which don’t read reports) and those made by people with too little time to read a report (most call center or retail staff, for instance) or no skill at interpreting it.
I guess I just don’t see the difference between BI and BA…
