So you have gone through the Discover and Plan of your Business Intelligence (BI) strategy and are ready to staff your BI support organization. What skills, experience, expertise and qualifications should you be looking for?

  • Since the term BI is often used to also include data management processes and technologies, let’s assume that in your case you are only looking for expertise required to build reports and dashboards and it does not include
    • Data integration (ETL, etc) expertise
    • Data governance (master data management, data quality, etc) expertise
    • Data modelling (relational and multidimensional) expertise
  • With above caveat here is a short list of REQUIRED kills
    • Training/certification/experienced in your specific BI platform
    • Working knowledge of relational DBMS and SQL query language
    • Working knowledge of multidimensional DBMS and  MDX query language (if using OLAP data sources, like Microsoft SQLServer Analysis Services or Oracle Essbase)
    • Familiarity with business (finance, etc) and technical (ETL, etc) processes which generate analytical data
    • Familiarity with data structures and content of the analytical data sources (data warehouse, data mart, etc)
    • All skills required for a business analyst such as communications, presentation, requirements gathering, etc
    • Other typical application development skills such as
      • Waterfall and agile methodology
      • Time, scope, resource, priority, project risk management
  • The following skills are GOOD TO HAVE
    • Working knowledge of user experience (UX) best practices
    • Training/certification/experience in multiple BI platforms
    • Dev ops skills and experience
    • Coding skills if BI platform/application customization or integration with other platforms and/or applications is required
Did I miss anything?