What are the skills sets required for a business intelligence developer?

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While admission to IIT, IIM, or top rated colleges is considered a ticket to success, as time flies you realise more than technical skills, non-technical skills are important to grasp.

However, I'm not saying that technical skills are not important but what business intelligence developer is without his people in the company?

Imagine what you would answer if someone would ask you - “Show me the reports of the sales you made in this financial year”. I would say, “Which financial year”, “what sales”.

But, a good business intelligence developer would consolidate every dataset by uncovering the unorganised data that has the ability to transform present infrastructure by offering insightful data.

This blog gives a vivid idea about the sets required for business intelligence developers ranging from what is business intelligence, and business intelligence developer roles and responsibilities.

What do you mean by Business Intelligence?

A business is not only narrowed down to budgeting but starting from human resources, providing value to targeted customers, to marketing, which is influenced by data.

There is a collection of hundreds and thousands of data, but your business does not need everything. Thanks to Business intelligence (BI) software that converts business data into actionable reports.

In simple terms, Business intelligence (BI) is a technical infrastructure that helps businesses to digest reports through data mining, data processing, data analysing, benchmarking, and descriptive analytics.

Business intelligence is designed to unify and optimise the big data and analytics of an organisation into filtered data that represent the financial health of the organisation.

What, still not clear? Okay, permit me to backtrack a little.

BI is classified into three layers -

• 1. The data source layer
• 2. The warehouse layer
• 3. The reporting layer

Let's explain these terms

A business intelligence developer at the data source layer is in charge of data sources and storage from various files.

A business intelligence developer at the warehouse layer is in charge of incorporating technologies and tools of Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL).

A business intelligence developer at the reporting layer moves data from the warehouse to interact with the data and visualise its importance.

Who is a business intelligence developer

A business intelligence developer is a person, who is in charge of BI interfaces. The major task is to analyse, develop, maintain, and filter unwanted chunks of data into manageable information to attain the organisation's aims and objectives.

However, only informed business decisions can lead you to success. A business intelligence developer is a person who has the insight to convert a flood of data into valuable data that guarantees an organisation's value of money.

BI developer spends researching in planning solutions, building OLAP, coding, testing, designing, debugging, and implementing developed tools that ensure business success. Therefore, nowadays, Business Intelligence Analyst is gaining popularity because he is the only person that offers analytical insight.

What are the Skills Sets Required for Business Intelligence Developers?

A business intelligence developer should belong to the programming and software engineering team and have profound knowledge of data modelling, data management, data design and data visualisation.

Moreover, you have to understand that the role of a business intelligence developer is not purely technical but also human-oriented. Therefore, here are the soft and hard skill sets required for business intelligence developers.

1. Data preparation

Have you ever thought about how the business makes accurate decisions? Let me tell you, the reason behind a successful business is a business intelligence developer who knows how to process, analyse, clean and transform raw data in an organised and uniform manner.

In simple terms, data preparation includes enriching source data and standing data format from various sources through the use of Alteryx, Improvado, and Tableau Prep. Moreover, cleaning up data helps in removing extraneous data making the business simple.

Data Preparation Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. After the data is extracted from the source, if an error is detected it is fixed before processing.
• 2. Clean and filter unorganised datasets and ensure high-quality data
• 3. High-quality data helps businesses in making informed and efficient decisions
• 4. Cloud data may grow but data preparation helps in scalability
• 5. Accelerate data use and collaboration that helps in fast results

2. Data Mining

Businesses can only increase revenue and decrease the cost of production if business intelligence developers can convert unwanted data into useful information.The process of understanding the different data from varied sources and summarising the relevant ones can create a systematic relationship between variables.

Knowledge of data mining means statistical analysis, machine learning, algorithms, computer science, learning databases, and more. Business intelligence developers use Konstanz Information Miner, Oracle data mining, and Rapid Miner to extract meaningful data.

Data Mining Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. Extract useful data to solve problems
• 2. Data mining is focused on the creation of insightful data
• 3. Business decisions are mostly influenced by facts and insightful data
• 4. Optimization of the layout of data

3. Statistical analysis

To get a bigger picture of data the business intelligence developer needs to develop in-depth knowledge of mean, median, range, and variance. Moreover, without statistical knowledge, no business can derive statistical data that can affect the business success stories.

Business intelligence developers should have profound knowledge of set theory, discrete, combinatorics, probabilities, random variables, bivariate, and more. Additionally, he should know to use Hive, Pig, SAS, and Hadoop. Businesses need to understand present trends, and statistical analysis to follow present trends.

Statistical Analysis Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. Offer graphs, pie charts, and charts in presenting data. Such types of visualisation make data more readable
• 2. Suggest predictions and solutions by studying past and present behaviour
• 3. Testing hypothesis

6. Descriptive analysis

Descriptive analytics dice raw data into understandable form to find out the missing values, abnormal distribution of data, and outliers. In simple terms, you can say that descriptive analytics process the data and create a summary or abstraction of data that helps the business in functioning.

Descriptive analytics combines statistical analysis techniques like data visualisation charts, histograms, whisker plots, and boxes to assess an organisation's financial behaviour. It accesses, compares spot anomalies and identifies weaknesses to increase the sales of the organisation.

Descriptive analytics Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. Planning new programs
• 2. Offer motivation with KPIs
• 3. Interpret survey reports
• 4. Understand sales trends

5. Data visualisation

Who can convert raw data into a graphical pattern? As Business analysts, you must understand the patterns present within the data to convert them into visible form. No businessman can take decisions without actual data presented in a visual manner which is known as a data pipeline.

The ETL process is part of tooling and a business analyst should know pie charts, demography, maps, Gantt Charts, Scatter Plots, and more. Moreover, such visual data is created through Photoshop and Powerpoint.

Data Visualisation Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. Visual data updates
• 2. Visualisation answers every question

6. Business Knowledge

Business intelligence developers should have key knowledge of business models. His knowledge has a direct impact on the conversion of raw data that impacts business strategy, operational decisions and tactics. He is the person who uses historical data to create reports, maps, and dashboards.

Therefore, without knowledge of short and long term goals, he can never support a company to grow. Sound business knowledge enhances the data quality and thereby quality of decision and success rate.

Business Knowledge Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. Boost productivity as he can combine business goals with technology
• 2. Offers a bird's eye view of the business
• 3. Enhance the accountability and ownership of the company's performance

7. Data Reporting

No business can be run by one person, hereby, if the business intelligence developer is not a good communicator then how will you work with your team members? Stakeholders can never work collectively without collaboration, interaction, and sharing of information across the company.

However, modern tools can simplify and customise the dashboards but without basic speaking skills and empathy, no insight can be helpful. Moreover, if you can communicate flawlessly with your teammates then there will also be fewer technical errors.

Data Reporting Benefits: Skills Sets Business Intelligence Developer

• 1. A friendly working environment makes people more productive
• 2. Easy in identifying targeted audience and their needs

Conclusion
I hope now you have got a glimpse of the Business Intelligence world and the skills required to be a successful business intelligence developer. However, it is important to blend soft skills with technical skills to make the journey of BI more successful. I hope this article on what are the skills sets required for business intelligence developers helps you to choose the right path. If you have any queries, do not hesitate to reach out to Business Toys.