How does a business intelligence position look like?

yzT

I'd want to read first-hand opinions about people who is currently working at such position (or have worked).

What's your daily job? Is there programming involved? What skills do you need to successfully perform your duties? How did you get them? Anything else you want to add xD

tkerber

A good friend of mine is a Senior Business Analyst who is in the process of transforming his career into Business Intelligence. He's told me it's a lot of SQL and working with big data. It's my understanding that it's kind of like taking large amounts of information and turning it into useful data for a company.

I may be completely off or wrong but I'll wait for other replies.

hellolin

I have been interning for a company that is working with big data, if you are not on the programming part, which is the data warehousing job, your job will mainly be involved with a lot of SQL and excel, both are able to learn online or in school. They told me that one of the heads of BI team had a history major before he came to the company, but other than the language and tools you will also need the mind set as well, it is not a routine job like most IT support roles are

yzT

By SQL I assume it's only to peform queries, isn't it? Or is it more like create tables, triggers, views, etc?

hellolin

Lots of left and right joins, and union joins, yes it's just to pull data that has been derived from the data warehouse team, then the Web/business Int. team make sense of those data and then make reports, and then give those business products for C-level or higher tier customers to sell

N2IT

I do some of this right now, more to come.

Writing queries and developing and designing database schemas for warehousing data.
Writing Stored Procedures and other advance coding techniques
Designing reports using Business Objects
Modeling data as need
UX and other design elements as required
Building proof of concepts applications, databases an reports using Access, Excel, sometimes building enterprise reports using SSRS or BOXI. Just started using BOXI it's pretty sweet
Lots and lots of business engagements and customer understanding. This includes requirements gathering and analysis.

Designing ETL processes including working with developers, whether designing the BPM or assisting converting the BPM into an ERD.
Understanding system intergration through different systems
Project Management

You'll create tables, views, triggers, sp, ETL's, etc. Knowing how to code C# and or VB is huge you can actually design and build the end product. Most of the positions I interviewed for what the analyst to have some of these skills.

My title is Senior BA - Cross Functional. I work within a supply chain BU to come up with designs to improve the data flow and integrity. It can get very complex at times which is great if you enjoy it. Like TK mentioned your job is to transform data into actionable reports for decisions. I am consistently learning new elements to this job.

At least this is my experience. Good times, but I am not an IT professional I am a data professional. Big difference.

Bottom line the more skills you have the better off you'll be at your role. It truly is a very technical position from a programming/development set of skills then of course you have all the business requirements that feed into your ability to design and create.