International Institute in Geneva
The volume of data collected by companies and stored in clouds is constantly increasing and the phenomenon is clearly not about to end. Business analytics and information systems are the backbone of organizational reporting and decision making.

Information Systems and Business Analysis - What's the difference?

Depending on how these terms are being used, there may be no real distinction between Management Information Systems vs Business Analytics, or they may relate to very distinct purposes.

While some organizations use the terms interchangeably, others refer to the databases and IT infrastructure used to collect and store performance data as a "management information system," while they call the extraction and interpretation process of MIS data "business analytics."

Even so, the meaning and use of these terms can change, sometimes significantly, from one organization to the next, but the point is that both terms generally relate to organizational reporting systems or processes.

This implies that both business analytics and information management are utterly critical to the overall success of any organization, as the ability to look at real-world results and determine what needs to be adjusted to achieve better results is vital to driving, sustaining and improving operational success.

How is business analytics used in real life?

Business Analysts utilize various analytical techniques and approaches to improve financially relevant issues such as fraud detection, risk mitigation, product pricing, marketing campaign optimization, financial planning, forecasting, etc. These issues can be controlled by a business analyst

Applications of business analytics are wide, from strategic business analytics, data protection and data security to decision making and significantly contribute to the expansion of many industries around the world.

What do business analytics use to support decision making ?

To enable companies to do something with all this data and derive relevant insights that will lead to sustainable performance improvements, Business Analysts can rely on a number of valuable tools.

Possessing many features, they offer an efficient way to sort data, to analyze it, to display it in real time, and thus help the company to identify habits, cyclical movements and then to imagine and create their future business model.

Here are examples of business analytics tools and business analytics software vendors Top 10 tools Business Analytics solutions

SAS Business Analytics

The high-level text analytics capabilities of SAS business analytics software allow users to examine and convert unstructured textual data into meaningful information that analysts can drill down to uncover significant insights.

SAS BA is equipped with a full range of statistics tools, which facilitate the process of conducting real-time analysis of large data sets. This best-in-class business analytics platform also enables prediction of future patterns from information gathered in big data.

QlikView

One of the most popular business analytics tools because of its unique properties, such as its patented technology and in-memory capability, that enable high-speed business analysis outputs.

As one of the top business analytics tools, QlikView provides users with the ability to visualize relationships between data using specific colors for linked and unlinked data with automatically maintained data association compressed to 10% of its native size.

Board

Board makes the list of highest rated business analytics software tools because of its state-of-the-art business analytics model that allows users to create highly interactive and insightful business analytics reports and dashboards.

The highly scalable business analytics platform incorporates industry-leading business analytics tools, including a strong statistical suite.

Its business analytics tool can handle massive volumes of data, and it can also handle precise scenario analysis and prediction by engineering the data provided to the scenarios.

Splunk

Splunk is one of the most popular enterprise analytics tools used in small and medium-sized businesses.

Originally launched to process machine log file data, Splunk has since added a host of advanced features over the years, in particular a user-friendly web interface and a variety of display options.

Sisense

Sisense incorporates dynamic and powerful text analytics capabilities to help users turn non-structured text into valuable business information.

The Sisense business analytics platform, featuring the proprietary Sisense Crowd accelerated BI, is powered by an open-source language for statistical computing. It enables its clients to conduct in-depth analysis and visualize complex data, enabling data-driven decisions and better forecasting of future trends.

Microstrategy

Microstrategy's enterprise analytics software incorporates superior analytical skills to seamlessly process unstructured textual data, which practitioners can then analyze via the platform's text analytics solutions.

One of the newest enterprise analytics tools, Microstrategy incorporates insightful analytical and statistical features that enable real-time trend forecasts with third-party data mining options.

This premier business analytics tool, which combines a range of business analytics tools and techniques, allows users to create and share business analytics reports anywhere and on any device.

Knime

KNIME, through its unique data assembly approach, facilitates the use of various components for machine learning and data mining that enable persistent analysis, visual programming, and seamless business analysis reporting.

Dundas BI

The full featured Dundas BI provides best-in-class business analysis and business intelligence solutions using the R programming language.

With powerful business analytics tools, Dundas BI delivers automated analysis, trend forecasting and a high-level dashboard that helps users envision data and create business analysis reports with easy-to-use drag-and-drop

Tibco Spotfire

Tibco Spotfire offers robust, automatic analytics solutions that enable data professionals to run enterprise reports and analyses over a defined period of time.

The latest upgrade to the Spotfire platform has significantly improved TIBCO's scalability, statistical analysis capabilities, and unstructured textual data analysis capability.

Tableau Big Data Analytics

Experts consensus that Tableau Big Data Analytics is one of the best business analytics software, taking into account its dynamic and cutting-edge unstructured text analysis capabilities.

Tableau's business analytics platform, which features robust and reliable statistical tools, allows users to perform in-depth analysis of social media networks and predict patterns based on current and historical data. 

Which business analytics tool is the best ?

These tools offer various applications to capture quantitative and qualitative data from enterprise systems. And of course, integrate it into their next strategy. So the answer might change depending on the company, the business, the markets and customers.

Most companies will opt for a mix of business analytics tools and software, including predictive modeling, statistical analysis, in order to identify weaknesses, predict events, solve future problems or forecast performance.

If you want to some examples of companies using business analytics to optimize business performance, click here

Courses of the specialization

Learning Business Analytics will help you to understand what these solutions are and how companies use Data Analytics in their business. International Institute in Geneva offers you a comprehensive course with a dedicated master in business analytics. Click here to know more about this program.

International Institute in Geneva obviously has no financial link with any of business intelligence and analytics software vendors  or tools, but it seemed inconceivable to us to present the Business Analyst tools without naming them.

There are of course many others, probably just as qualitative, so we invite you to regularly monitor the evolutions and new players on the market in order to be the most efficient. 

Feel ready to join International Institute in Geneva, get a Business Analytics degree and bring things further ?