The Roles In Business Intelligence

There is a general need for more pervasive Business Intelligence [BI] skills in most organization.

Many IT managers and business managers mistakenly believe that their current IT staff - data architects, data stewards, data integrators know sufficient about BI to take on this task. This is one of the biggest mistakes in BI planning and implementation.

BI teams mandate very specific skill sets - not understood by management. The method of deploying BI is different than other IT projects, so skills required are also different.

This difference must be communicated to management before any BI Program commences.

BI Skill Categories

BI skill categories include:

Data Management – need is directly proportional to number of subject areas you are integrating on Data Warehouse. This is quite different from other application development which concentrate more on the user front end – the dashboards etc and BI controls.

Application Delivery - there are a number of ways that this can be done depending upon the organisations current IT infrastructure and desktop capability.

Program Alignment – Program of Management, alignment, change management.
Lot of IT managers mistakenly believe that all they need is a couple of technical guys and they are done. BI projects come to their knees thorugh this belief. This is NOT a BI project – we just have an intellectual team of data loading.

Change Mangement - In any organisation, there are a lot of inhibitors to growth and to propel change. BI Programs are so linked to businesses that they have the ability to accelerate change. This may surprise some organisations, and those who are not ready for the accelerated rate of change may find the program outcomes overwhelming, and therefore resist adoptiong.

Therefore the businesses have to embrace this rate of change before they will embrace BI.

Planning for business intelligence must include headcount and additional skillset for the BI team.

BI Roles

The BI Roles include:

• BI Strategist: Defines the BI Program, the BI Policy, BI Governance, Data Governance and BI Portfolio. This is done in partnership with the business.
• Business Users: Explore all 5 styles of BI — Scorecards and Dashboards, Enterprise Reporting, OLAP Analysis, Advanced and Predictive Analysis, and Alerts and Proactive Notification — integrated into a seamless reporting, analysis, and monitoring experience for fact-based decisions. Understand how to use BI applications to drive strategy and operational efficiency.
• BI Project or Application Managers: Turn business users’ requirements into insightful BI applications, while maintaining the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Analysts: Investigate enterprise data with easy to use analytical techniques such as pivot, drill, sort, prompting, on-the-fly metric creation, report filtering, ad hoc report creation, and more.
• Report Authors: Design and refine scorecards, dashboards, enterprise reports, and OLAP reports — with what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) ease.
• BI Developers: Create the crucial and reusable report building blocks that business users, analysts, and report authors use: KPIs, metrics, data filters, prompts, time series calculations and many more.
• BI Architects: Model the business into easy to understand objects such as business dimensions, business attributes, and facts to eliminate database table, schema, and naming complexity.
• Administrators: Manage enterprise BI applications for thousands of users using real-time system monitoring, historical operating information, and comprehensive security.

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