Data discovery versus business intelligence

You may be confused about data discovery and business intelligence technologies; it seems they are very close to each other or even BI tools can do all what data discovery can do. And why do we need a separate data discovery tool, such as, SAP Lumira?

In order to better understand the difference between the two technologies, you can look at the table below:

	Enterprise BI	Data discovery
Key users	All users	Advanced analysts
Approach	Vertically-oriented (top to bottom), semantic layers, requests to existing repositories	Vertically-oriented (bottom-up), mushup, putting data in the selected repository
Interface	Reports, dashboards	Visualization
Users	Reporting	Analysis
Implementation	By IT consultants	By business users

Let's consider the pros and cons of data discovery:

Pros:

• Rapidly analyze data with a short shelf life

• Ideal for small teams

• Best for tactical analysis

• Great for answering on-off questions quickly

Cons:

• Difficult to handle for enterprise organizations

• Difficult for junior users

• Lack of scalability

As a result, it is clear that BI and data discovery handles their own tasks and complement each other.