What is BI Developer: Role, Responsibilities and Skills

These can be internal metrics compared to past performance benchmarks, as well as external metrics. Competitive analysis is becoming a crucial part of business intelligence. BI tools are allowing organizations to monitor competitors’ performance, changes in the market, and customer behavior changes. You can do this by analyzing competitors’ case studies, blogs, articles, videos, etc. After defining your scope of business intelligence, you will probably realize just how big of a project it will be to implement BI.

Find out how different WGU is about personalizing and supporting your education. Best thing is you can predict the future growth with the data you have. Testing phase is all about finding bugs in the system, but for the most part, a BI developer will fix issues bound to queries and data representation.

Report curation and data modeling

Reporting is a separate duty that doesn’t concern engineering as much, but rather working with databases and data models. Using a BI interface, users make queries to the database to retrieve some information. Then this information is formatted into a visual form , or a textual summary by the given properties.

Now branch managers can identify clients that may have a change in investment needs. And leadership can track if a region’s performance is above or below average and click in to see the branches that are driving that region’s performance. This leads to more opportunities for optimization along with better customer service for clients. They need to continuously plan and research all possible solutions for any existing problems as well as future problems that occur within the organization.

Translating business requirements into technical ones

Your BI strategy needs to first align with your business goals and vision. With business intelligence, data can drive transformation in your organization. This initiative will place trusted, relevant data in the hands of employees so they can make informed decisions every day.

However, that doesn’t mean business intelligence can simply get bundled with data engineering or data science. A business intelligence developer doesn’t just visualize data and generate reports. This expertise makes it easier for them to understand what data is important to end users. That’s why we take care of the maintenance and support of your entire BI stack from the initial data source to the visual layer. We work with all major vendors, and our support service includes dashboard health monitoring, user management, dashboard user consulting, and minor ad-hoc development for existing reports. BI is designed to answer specific queries and provide at-a-glance analysis for decisions or planning.

Effective BI strategy implementation

Self-service business intelligence is characterized by IT managing the data , allowing users to interact with their data directly. This means that IT can govern data access while empowering more people to visually explore their data and share their insights. Business intelligence is continually evolving to keep pace with business needs and technology, so each year, we identify current trends to keep users up-to-date on innovations. Realize that artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to grow, and businesses can integrate the insights from AI into a broader BI strategy. As companies strive to be more data-driven, efforts to share data and collaborate will increase. Data visualization will be even more essential to work together across teams and departments. This article is just an introduction to the world of business intelligence.

• The end-user should also be able to create automatic reports monthly.
• In the scope of a business intelligence project, a BI developer takes engineering, management, and strategic planning responsibilities.
• The CDO or other executive sponsor needs to consider the support and training required for deployment and consider how to scale this platform to the entire enterprise.
• This leads to more opportunities for optimization along with better customer service for clients.
• This can be done with the help of data modeling — a structure by which the data is stored in the database.
• You need a strategy because merely choosing the right technology, and implementing a software platform is not enough to realize a return on investment.
• These can come both from internal and external sources such as market surveys, sales volumes, company budgeting, etc.

Furthermore, they are responsible for building online analytical processes using relational and multidimensional databases. Due to the level of data reliance of most modern companies, business intelligence developers can work in a wide variety of industries and organizations. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics categorizes business intelligence developers as software developers. Those in the top 10% of earners made more than $170,100, while the bottom 10% earned less than $65,210. The exact salary may vary drastically depending on your educational level, certifications, years of experience, and location. A business intelligence developer’s duties depend on the scope of each project and the size of the company. Sometimes, data engineers and data scientists, who are concerned with building data pipelines and mining data for patterns, respectively, might also work on BI projects.

Great BI helps businesses and organizations ask and answer questions of their data. Employment opportunities for software developers are expected to grow by 22% from 2019 to 2029. As software continues to be vital throughout the business world, many existing services will get digitized while new digital services spring up.

• The number of parameters is expanded with diagnostic information, treatment data, and mortality rates.
• In some cases, a BI developer can have minimum interaction with the software engineering and operate as an SQL specialist to ensure proper querying.
• And leadership can track if a region’s performance is above or below average and click in to see the branches that are driving that region’s performance.
• Many self-service business intelligence tools and platforms streamline the analysis process.
• At the start of the project, business analysis in the field of BI will help set precise requirements for future software and make the right strategic decisions.

There are lots of approaches to building unified storage for all corporate information. We discussed these approaches in a dedicated article about warehouses.

BI offers capabilities for near real-time sales tracking, allowing users to discover insights into customer behavior, forecast profits, and more. Diverse industries like retail, insurance, and oil have adopted BI, and more are joining each year. BI platforms adapt to new technology and the innovation of its users. From planning projects to developing software, BI developers have an array of job roles and responsibilities which require a broad set of skills.

• If your BI strategy focuses on reacting to ad hoc reporting requests, you won’t use business intelligence to its full potential.
• On the technical side, raw data is collected from business systems.
• I want to receive the latest insights on data and AI via our whitepaper publication and newsletter subscription .
• It’s important to note that this is a very modern definition of BI—and BI has had a strangled history as a buzzword.
• Best thing is you can predict the future growth with the data you have.
• Now branch managers can identify clients that may have a change in investment needs.

This article will serve as an introduction to BI and is the tip of the iceberg. At the start of the project, business analysis in the field of BI will help set precise requirements for future software and make the right strategic decisions. Whether it’s assisting your future developers kick start their data career or ensuring your team can learn the newest dashboard analysis tricks, we’ve got your educational needs covered.

When working with data, deciding what’s important and what’s not can be a challenge—especially with scattered sets that don’t easily translate into insights. The current technical landscape can be confusing with a wide range of offerings, but our expertise in the field guides you through the complexity of BI strategy. The most innovative dashboarding and reporting solutions do the heavy lifting, so you have less work to do. Try Tableau for free to create beautiful visualizations with your data. But for those who haven’t adopted a tool yet, or are simply looking to learn more, it can be difficult to understand exactly what BI is.