Career roadmap: Business Intelligence Analyst
Chances are good that any skill set or title including the word “cloud” will open doors for new job opportunities these days. That’s because the cloud has become a key component of digital transformation—something many organizations are striving to achieve.
To that end, enterprises continue to migrate data, workloads, development, and other components of their technology environments from on premises to cloud services at a brisk pace, and they need people who possess relevant skills and experience.
Among the cloud-related positions that are in particularly high demand today are cloud architects. These are the professionals responsible for overseeing the cloud computing architecture within an organization. They’ve become especially important as cloud technologies and environments continue to grow more complex.
Cloud architects should have a good knowledge about the concepts and moving parts involved in continuous integration and continuous delivery, according to recruitment platform provider FE. “They must offer expert guidance to development teams regarding infrastructure,” the company says. “There is a need for the architects to take responsibility for the IT environments throughout their lifecycles.”
Cloud architects must be able to articulate where cloud services fit in best within an organization, and put in place a process to assess which applications will access cloud services. They should also be able to identify any risks with the cloud and come up with risk-mitigation plans, FE says. The job will likely require working in conjunction with the IT, cyber security, risk management, finance, and other departments.
Business and technology executives at organizations in every industry understand the importance of being able to gain value from data, by analyzing the information for trends and then using the insights gleaned to help enhance processes, increase sales, improve customer experience, or reap other benefits.
Business intelligence analysts are at the center of those efforts. And they will likely play an increasingly important role at enterprises as business intelligence (BI) technologies continue to grow in popularity.
Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the global BI market will grow from $23.1 billion in 2020 to $33.3 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent during the forecast period. A number of factors are helping to drive expansion of the market, including the growing focus on digital transformation, greater investments in analytics, increasing demand for dashboards for data visualization, rising adoption of cloud services, and increase in data generation.
The technology has particularly value during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many businesses are facing high-level challenges, the report says. The crisis has expedited the need for all companies to put their data to work to speed up the decision-making process, it says, and a comprehensive BI practice can help organizations define proper metrics to survive a crisis.
BI enables companies to take a closer look at how they’re operating by taking inventory of where they are doing well and where they can improve, the report says.
BI analysts leverage data analytics, visualization, and modeling tools and techniques to identify trends that can help business executives make more informed decisions. The role has become vital to any organization looking to gain the most value from their ever-increasing data volumes. These professionals can help find out where and how companies can reach new customers and markets and stem losses.
Discover Data Science, which provides online learning programs, has noted that BI analysts “are a necessary part of making the vast amount of data now available to companies useful. Business intelligence analysts straddle the worlds of business and [IT], having a firm grasp of each, and are able to mine and analyze data to recommend growth strategies for a company.
