Business intelligence (BI) leverages software tools to transform data into useful insights that help business decisions. BI tools access and analyse data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts, and maps to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.

First Job or Career Changer’s Choice

Therefore, the more experience the candidate was in business, the better understanding the candidate will have.

In a nutshell, The term BI refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to provide information for better business decision making.

Business intelligence developers must be able to understand, as they work with different types of data e.g. spreadsheet, CSV, XML and so on. As BI Developer, it can include anything from coding to testing to debugging to designing to implementing newly developed tools.

A BI developer spends a lot of time researching and planning solutions for existing problems within the company. BI developers also are responsible for building OLAP, or online analytical processing. They also work with databases, both relational and multidimensional.

Work Environment

This position is most commonly found in office environments in large corporations and in IT companies. Most BI developer positions require some technical background and a substantial amount of work experience in other business areas. This also made a perfect choice for a career change, especially those who are interested in switching to IT/software

As the primary focus of this position is to solve problems, BI developers must always be dealing with data and presenting it in an understandable way to human brains. They should be capable of creating tables and writing reports on their findings, and they often simplify highly technical language for others in the company.

Tech Skills Required

Here are some basic skills required,

  • SQL and relational database, Data Warehouse
  • SSRS/SSAS/SSIS, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), Report Builder
  • Power BI, DAX, and security rules.
  • Some coding skills like VB, C#, JavaScript etc.

Business Skills vs Tech Skills

BI or Data Analyst is a fast-growing role, almost every company with data will need at least one person who understands BI.

As working in BI, you either can focus on the business side such as organise information with different parties and interpret them to the management team.

If you enjoy doing technical tasks, there is a big room for you to just focus on development sides such as Power BI, data warehouse and data-related tasks.

That is why BI has been a very popular choice for people who want to change career to IT/Software. People with marketing, finance, accounting, business management can all do BI and they usually do better than those who just recently graduated. The main reason is BI does require a good understanding of the business operation and people communication.

Example Work

Here is an example Data Warehouse and Power BI

Data Warehouse Architecture

 

Power BI Reporting/Dashboard