Understanding Data Science and Business Intelligence

Abhijeet Thorat
3 min readJul 7, 2021

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Data science can simply be stated as an evolved version of Business Intelligence. Let’s begin with some basic understanding of the two concepts and take a deeper look at the two distinct but closely allied fields within Data Analytics. Data Science is data-driven where many associative processes are applied together to extract meaning and insights from available large and complex data. whereas Business Intelligence helps monitor the current data of the organization to understand the historical performance of the business.

Business Intelligence :

Business Intelligence is a process of collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting the data. With Business Intelligence ,organization can have a better understanding and performs better decision-making. Through software services and tools , Business Intelligence process performs the analysis. Using Business Intelligence in organizations can perform several strategic and operational business decisions. BI tools are used for analysis and creation of reports, producing graphs, dashboards, summaries, and charts. Business Intelligence commonly used for Measuring Performance and quantifying the progress towards reaching the business goal. Performing quantitative analysis through predictive analytics and modelling. Visualizing data and storing data in data warehouses and its further processing in OLAP. Using knowledge management programs to develop effective strategies to gain insights about learning management and raise compliance issues.

Business Intelligence Architecture

Data Science :

Data science is an umbrella, term that is used to represent all the underlying data operations. Data Science is like a pool of many tools that are used to shape data. A Data Scientist, in general, is about finding patterns within data. It is a multi-disciplinary field, meaning that data science is a combination of several disciplines. Mathematics, Statistics and Programming form the backbone of data science. Other than this, data scientists need to have domain knowledge to find out patterns in the data. Data Science is a process of extracting, manipulating, visualizing, maintaining data as well as generating predictions. A Data Scientist is supposed to have knowledge of various data operations as well as machine learning algorithms. Using Data Science, industries can extract insights and forecast their performance.

Data Science Venn diagram

Summary :

In a nutshell, Data Science and Business Intelligence are facilitators of each other and can be said that data science is best performed in conjunction with Business Intelligence. Both are required to have an efficient understanding of the business trends hidden in large volumes of data. While BI is the logical first step, data science follows to get deeper insight.

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Abhijeet Thorat
Abhijeet Thorat

Written by Abhijeet Thorat

I am a Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Subject Matter Expert, Working on Oracle and Microsoft Technologies.

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