Why is a Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst career ranked as one of the top-paying jobs in the STEM fields?

Data is a valuable commodity for any business. Business Intelligence (BI) analysts decode this data to drive actionable insights, across industries covering software and technology, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, banking and finance and e-commerce.

The BI analyst role is becoming increasingly indispensable as organizations move to capitalize on the volumes of data through data analytics, data modelling techniques and data visualization capabilities. The changing business requirements call for a Business Intelligence Analyst to be agile and respond to the big data or enormous amount of data collected by businesses today.

What Does A Business Intelligence Analyst Do?

The primary role of the Business Intelligence analyst within a business intelligence system lies in assisting to build a bridge through the business decision-makers with the power of data.

The Business Intelligence Analyst career is dynamic across organisations. In a large setup, the BIA would work across big data to formulate future intelligence-gathering priorities. BIAs may be expected to work around the "4 'V's of Big Data", a term coined by IBM to define the humongous inputs of data characterised by-

1. Volume – The quantity of data through historical and live sources.

2. Variety – The different formats of data unstructured and structured.

3. Veracity – The trust concerns around data.

4. Velocity – The speed at which the data is generated.

Business Intelligence Analyst Job Responsibilities

• Data collection from different sources to recommend innovative solutions that drive organisational efficiency.

• Perform cost-benefit analyses to optimize business performance.

• Develop and manage Business Intelligence solution 

• Work on reports, processes and Excel VBA applications throughout the data life cycle.

• Collaborate with business users to analyse business requirements and processes.

• Create and maintain data-documentation collating data requirements, design and user manuals.

• Identify opportunities to improve processes and strategies with AI models.

Business Intelligence Analyst Skills

Behavioural Skills

• Ability to communicate crisp and avid presentation skills.

• Superior leadership abilities, team, skills required for a data science project.

• Problem-solving skills, logical reasoning and critical thinking.

• Ability to collaborate within a diverse, global workforce.

Technical skills

• Proficient in ETL (extract, transform, load).

• Hadoop, R, SQL and SAS knowledge and their usage priorities.

• Knowledge of cloud computing and data storage technology (BigQuery and Redshift)

• Database design, warehousing and data architecture knowledge.

• Data mining and analytics.

• Understanding of Data security and privacy.

• Data visualization capabilities like Tableau and Qlik

Business Intelligence Analyst Job Roles

Business Intelligence Directors

Business Intelligence Directors are responsible for driving the business intelligence and analytics process of an organisation. They lead a team of architects, analysts, developers, and managers to unlock data-driven solutions at the highest levels of the company leadership. BI directors' mentor junior staff, interact with external and internal clients, and design delivery systems to meet project requirements.

• Business Intelligence Directors Salary Range- US$120,000-US$135,000

Business Intelligence Managers

They lead a team of BI analysts, help in data extraction, quality control, risk analysis to increase profitability and drive the business strategy. Business Intelligence Managers design and maintain data metrics that correspond to optimization strategies, BI managers translate raw data into intelligent insights for policy formulation.

• Business Intelligence Manager Salary Range- $105,000-US$120,000

Business Intelligence Architects

Business Intelligence Architects work with multidimensional data warehouses and data pipelines. They manage a team of developers to determine different platform function and how they can be improved to streamline business intelligence gathering. Besides BI architects oversee customization of particular applications according to client requirements.

• Business Intelligence Architect Salary Range– US$95,000-US$105,000

Business Intelligence Consultants

Business Intelligence Consultants may be attached to the company or work independently for short or long-term assignments. Performing similar functions to other business intelligence roles, consultants evaluate the efficiency of existing legacy systems and help staff to understand the best practices to minimize operating costs and increase profits.

• Business Intelligence Consultant Salary Range– US$95,000-US$80,000