Richard Herschel wrote an interesting blog entry about business intelligence job descriptions and the variety of skills being sought by employers. He told of a search he did for “business intelligence” jobs at Dice.com which yielded 1,942 position listings. The set of skills required ranged from program management (new content creation, value propositions, cost justification) to specific hands-on knowledge of business intelligence tools (e.g. Cognos, SAS, Hyperion, etc.).
His main observation was that most of the postings lacked a requirement for strong analytics and communications backgrounds (e.g., math, statistics, quantitative methods, and verbal and writing proficiency) sighting that “the main focus of the job was the delivery of business intelligence solutions to end users to facilitate their making more informed business decisions”.
For years our industry has been focused on the infrastructure (modeling, ETL, dimensional structure, reporting, etc.) of how data is delivered and less on how a business is to use the data once it has been brought all together. Perhaps this is why SAS institute recently launched a marketing campaign to redefine their wares as “business analytics vs. business intelligence. This of course set off a small firestorm of accusations of marketing hype followed by rebuttals.
Regardless of the marketing hype or semantics involved, I do believe that an acute understanding of how information is really used to make decisions could significantly improve the value of any business intelligence professional.
