Business Intelligence (BI) focuses on querying, reporting, and analytics to answer questions about past business performance such as what happened, how many, and where issues exist. Business Analytics builds on BI with additional forecasting, regression, and modeling capabilities to answer why things occurred and predict future trends and outcomes. Business Analysis involves understanding an organization's structure, policies, and operations to recommend solutions enabling the achievement of its goals by liaising among stakeholders.

1. Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, and
Business Analysis

2. Business Intelligence (BI)
Querying, reporting, OLAPs, alerts
Can answer questions such as what
happened, how many, how often, where the
problem is, and what actions are needed

3. Business Analytics
Continuous iterative exploration of past business
performance to gain insight and drive business
planning
BI + additional level of functionality
(forecasting, regression, and modeling)
Can answer questions like why is this
happening, what if these trends continue, what will
happen next (predict), what is the best that can
happen (optimize)

4. Business Analysis
Set of tasks and techniques used to work as a
liaison among stakeholders in order to understand
the structure, policies, and operations of an
organization, and to recommend solutions that
enable the organization to achieve its goals