What does a business intelligence analyst do?
Becoming a data-driven organization is increasingly a top priority for businesses of all sizes — and the business intelligence analyst plays a key role in helping them achieve that objective.
As organizations build up their business intelligence capabilities by drawing on querying, data mining, data visualization and other data analytics technologies, BI analysts are tasked with using those tools to produce insights that can inform and guide business decision-making. That requires a combination of technical skills and business knowledge, plus critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills.
“Their job is to use the data to help the business make real-time decisions, so BI analysts need to be technical enough to analyze the data, and they also have to understand the business and how the business can apply the data,” said Josh Drew, Boston-area regional vice president for Robert Half Technology and The Creative Group, two units of staffing firm Robert Half International Inc.
“They show others where the data can drive decisions, and the value of the data, because most people don’t fully appreciate how much information is at their fingertips today,” Drew added.
Chase Hammond, business intelligence analyst at content marketing company Skyword Inc., described his primary responsibility as making sure “data flows within the organization in such a way that it’s as useful as possible for as many people as possible.”
To do that, Hammond works with everyone from business executives to financial managers and sales and marketing staffers to help them understand the insights that the data analyses he does yield.
“In a company like mine, we already know data is powerful,” he said. “So, I’m focused on answering specific business questions: How are we doing against a new strategy? How are our sales doing? How profitable are our clients?”
What is the role of a business intelligence analyst? Business intelligence analysts do much of the day-to-day work of the data analysis process. They work with executives and other business users to identify what data is needed to answer their questions, and then they bring that data together, run BI queries and create data visualizations, reports and dashboards to help their business colleagues extract meaning from the data sets being analyzed. BI analysts also increasingly work side by side with business users on self-service BI deployments, teaching them how to manipulate and analyze data themselves as part of efforts to further increase analytics speed and agility. Through those functions, BI analysts help decision-makers understand the overall performance of a company and the state of specific business units or departments, such as sales, finance and HR, as well as business trends, customer behavior, marketing opportunities and problems that need to be addressed. “To do this, they sit down with executives and business professionals to understand what they’re trying to measure, track and better understand,” said Doug Henschen, analyst at Constellation Research. “They then work with data management professionals to understand the applications and data sources that will provide the appropriate information [and] to have the required data extracted, integrated and transformed, as required, to support ongoing reporting and analysis.” From there, Henschen said BI analysts work iteratively with both the data management team and the business stakeholders to develop and refine key performance indicators, visualizations, reports, dashboards and, in some cases, storyboards or briefing books. The information that BI analysts provide helps guide day-to-day operational decisions and strategic planning; it’s also sometimes used to program automated responses to specific business scenarios.
