Top 10 Business Intelligence Skills

Business intelligence (BI) is a profession that provides insightful data to help organizations make informed decisions. Since business intelligence uses information obtained from extensive data sets to provide insightful reports, it is strongly related to the discipline of data visualization. Businesses use various data visualization techniques to present information from structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data collections. Business intelligence and visualization go hand in hand, where one strategy aids professionals in deriving useful information from structured data and the other projects it in a representational form.

Adapting to business intelligence skills is necessary to survive in the rapidly growing technology industry. Going for Business Intelligence and Visualization certification will help you to inculcate the important business intelligence skills and aid you drive data-driven business decisions.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is the process of improving a company's trends and choices through the exploration, agglomeration, and assessment of the accumulated data kept by an organization. The data can be unstructured, semi-structured, or structured.

Business intelligence immensely helps in making technology-related decisions in an organization. Business intelligence, which initially appeared as organized consumer data, gradually began to affect decisions made by major corporations. Data on consumers is displayed through business intelligence in visual formats such as graphs, charts, tables, etc.

Importance of BI skills in Modern Businesses

Business intelligence techniques, tools, and strategies are used to analyze and show data in a comprehensible and user-readable visual representation. The amount of data is increasing every day, and organizations need better management to handle it. Business intelligence is the key to dealing with enormous datasets.

Business intelligence skills are needed in modern businesses because of the following reasons:

Increases Organizational Efficiency: A proper business intelligence management system increases a company's overall efficiency. It helps to produce timely information that is extracted from various data sources. Business intelligence helps to inform everyone in an organization about the decisions with accuracy.

Enhances Marketing Efforts: Since business intelligence tools and techniques help analysts to know what the target audience wants, it integrates the marketing efforts in a particular direction. The marketing team builds strategies and campaigns that increase the return on investment and prove productive for the company.

Provides a Comparative Edge: There are some technical skills required for a business intelligence analyst who identifies what the competitor companies are planning to do. Keeping that in mind, the organization develops ideas and strategies that yield better results than the competitors. Business intelligence provides a competitive advantage as well.

Identifies Market Trends: BI allows marketers to use data from various external sources to identify areas that can result in higher profit margins and locate sales patterns. Business intelligence generates factual information that aids businesses in their analysis of consumer data to spot emerging market trends.

Top 10 Business Intelligence Skills

There are numerous business intelligence skills required to become a successful business intelligence professional. These skills include both technical and soft skills that a BI analyst should master. Some of the essential Business intelligence skills needed are enumerated as follows:

Understanding Data 

It is impossible to work with data if an individual does not properly understand the particular data. One of the basic business intelligence analyst skills is that data should be properly understood, along with knowing how to proceed with it. The data needs to be collected from multiple sources, prepared, and cleaned to obtain meaningful insights. 

Analyzing Data

The collection and storage of data is not enough. Business intelligence skills also consist of the knowledge of analyzing data and extracting insightful information that can be used in the company's progress. This is one of the major technical skills required for business intelligence analysts to perform their daily duties.

Proper Analysis of data brings out a lot of information regarding the company's past performance, the outcome of various strategies, organizational performance, making forecasts, and so on. Hence, BI professionals should be equipped with the skill of data analysis.

The Significance of Report Preparation

Learning how to prepare reports is one of the major business intelligence skills. It helps companies to create data patterns and store the information conveniently to perform calculations for comparing the performances that help generate accurate reports. 

BI involves selecting a compatible report preparation tool for navigating reporting software for better visualization of data. With the help of reports, the company's performance becomes clear, attracting more investments if performed better.

Business Problem and Objective Definition

A business intelligence analyst must be skilled in understanding the business problem and provide immediate solutions as and when required. Various BI tools help overcome the obstacles that come in the way of fulfilling the business's long-term and short-term objectives.

Additionally, BI skills include understanding the objective of the organization and aligning the business activities with the objectives. A business always walks towards fulfilling its objectives and doing away with the business problems is one way of attaining the goals.

Building Models

Preparing necessary business models is a major role of a business intelligence analyst. Business intelligence skills are required to build necessary models considering the organizational objectives and requirements of various projects. These models help businesses to align the business course of action with the objectives of the company.

Anticipating Client Requirements

Clients are the driving force of any business, and fulfilling client requirements is the primary objective of a company. Understanding client requirements is an important aspect of business intelligence which helps the organization to evaluate what the client wants and how they should proceed with the project.

Some basic business intelligence skills needed to get the hang of the prerequisites of a particular project that a client brought in. When properly understood, business intelligence professionals prepare the necessary course of action that should be taken to fulfill client requirements.

Programming

Business intelligence is a technical domain, and the knowledge of programming language skills is an absolute necessity. Business intelligence specialist skills include a grasp of the major and mostly used programming languages such as Java, Python, SQL queries, C++, etc. 

A lot of business problems require solutions that are derived from the use of programming languages. A programming analysis helps business intelligence analysts provide solutions to such technical business problems.

Communication Skills

Proper communication skills are a major requirement for any professional in a company. It is a soft skill that a business intelligence professional must acquire to effectively communicate the findings among the other departments of the company and also the stakeholders. These findings, in turn, help the management to make important business decisions.

Especially the front and developers have to have a strong hold on communication as they are responsible for communicating in the technical aspects to the non-technical people in the company. 

Data Visualization and Interpretation

Data visualization is a key business intelligence developer skill that includes the preparation of information in a representational form, such as charts, graphs, maps, tables, etc., with the help of data visualization tools. It is the way in which data is presented in front of non-technical people because visualization makes the information user-friendly and understandable. Data interpretation skills also take into account the knowledge of visual designs and statistical data.

Time Management

Time management and organization are one of the very important soft skills that a business intelligence analyst must acquire. Time management helps keep the work pace in check and furnishes data whenever required. It saves the company time and also increases the operational efficiency. 

Providing data on time helps stakeholders to make important decisions without any delays. Information provided by business intelligence tools is not only in real-time but is also reliable.

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Industry-Specific Skills for Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a wide domain that has applications in multiple industries. Some skills are common in all of them, whereas some are industry-specific. Here, Data Visualization with QlikView training will provide you hands-on sessions and help you cover the basic and advanced visualization techniques on QlikView. The following industries specific skills are required for business intelligence professionals to succeed in their careers:

Finance 

Business intelligence tools and techniques are increasingly used in the financial industry to assist management in making major financial decisions. The business intelligence skills required in finance are enumerated as follows:

• Budgeting: With the help of historical data analysis, business intelligence tools help to draft the budget for specific projects and the coming financial year for the organization.
• Making Forecasts: Business intelligence is applied to creating forecasting models that predict the future performance of any organization based on statistical data and past performance. BI tools and techniques combine such data to predict future performance and business trends.
• Financial Reporting: BI tools are used in companies to generate insightful financial reports to look into the financial performance and provide greater visibility to the stakeholders about the company's financial situation.
• Performance Monitoring: business intelligence techniques are incorporated within an organization to constantly track and monitor financial performance. It also uses various techniques to keep the performance on track if it gets diverted in some way.

Marketing

Marketing is an integral part of an organization. Marketing can be done through various means, such as in-house marketing, third-party marketing, marketing through agencies, and so on. Business intelligence greatly influences the marketing process in the following ways:

• Promotional Activities: Promoting the production services offered by a company is a crucial aspect of marketing. BI techniques allow marketers to understand which marketing initiatives are working in their favor and which are unproductive. 
• Tight Deadlines: Working within tight deadlines is a key skill that a BI professional should master. It helps to generate prompt marketing ideas and execute them within the deadline to see the best results.
• Marketing Dashboard: Preparing a detailed marketing dashboard is a major activity in which business intelligence tools assist individuals. It consists of all the marketing campaigns and efforts, and just a dashboard is presented to the stakeholders for evaluation.

Human Resources

BI analyst skills are required in the domain of human resources as well. It takes care of a lot of HR processes that can be stated as follows:

• Workforce Management: Business intelligence tools greatly impact a company's HR management. It assists stakeholders in managing the workforce and integrating their efforts toward the attainment of organizational goals.
• Recruitment Processes: Recruiting an individual in a company is not an easy job. various parameters are considered and exam ment before selecting a candidate for the vacant position. BI tools help to scan the profiles of the potential candidates suitable for the job position, saving a lot of time for the company and making the process efficient.
• Staff Analysis: Properly analyzing the staff performance is necessary to understand which employees are being produced for the company and who is not. It also identifies the areas of improvement for the employees.

Operations

The operations of a company can get haphazard if not managed properly. With an increasing amount of data, everyday operations are data-focused and require business intelligence skills to function. 

The following are the important BI skills in operations:

• Storing Data: A major part of operations is to acquire, clean and store data properly so that it can be used later. BI tools perform these functions to safely store data and derive information when required.
• Decision-making: As accurate information about the past and present performance of the companies is presented to the stakeholders, it becomes easier for them to make organizational decisions. These decisions are based on facts and data and not on mere assumptions. BI tools perform these activities and make predictions for the company's future performance.

Sales

Every company has a sales department that looks after all the sales-related concerns. Business intelligence helps fulfill a company's short-term and long-term sales objectives and ultimately generate revenue.

The following are the BI skills required in the sales industry:

• Integrating Sales Operations: Integrating efforts of various departments towards successfully making sales is crucial. BI tools help identify the target audience and allow marketers to design sales pitches to convince potential consumers to make purchases.
• CRM Management: customer relationship management allows organizations to hold on to their customers for a longer time. Business intelligence techniques provide ideas to the sales team regarding strategies for improving the CRM management system in the organization.
• Performance Monitoring: BI tools constantly prepare reports about the progress of the sales in a company. it helps the management to monitor the sales performance and make any changes accordingly.

Training and Development for Business Intelligence Skills

Apart from acquiring the basic technical and soft skills for business intelligence, one may look towards various training options for enhancing the skills. Becoming a business intelligence analyst is not easy as one needs to constantly develop and upskill themselves to prove their part in the industry. 

The major forms of training and development for business intelligence skills are stated as follows:

Online Courses and Certifications

Apart from the qualifications and degree, effective certification courses and online programs can be helpful for business intelligence professionals to get a job position in an esteemed company. These courses generally help candidates learn the recent trends in a field to remain up to date. 

On-the-Job Training and Learning

Various organizations provide training before hiring candidates for the job. On-the-job training and learning are a part of human resource management, and it helps mold individuals according to the requirements of the company. It also makes new employees familiar with the rules and regulations of the organization and allows them to learn the working model of the workplace.

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Conclusion

Business intelligence and visualization are important concepts in today's technologically advancing industry. Business intelligence tools help to simplify data, whereas visualization techniques create a visual representation of the extracted information. 90% of the data captured in the human brain is visual, which makes it amply clear that visual representation of data holds a greater impact than data in any other form.

Business intelligence is also an integral part of the analytics team. Every industry requires business intelligence professionals making it a prosperous career option. If you are a tech enthusiast interested in learning about business intelligence and visualization concepts, we recommend you go for KnowledgeHut Business Intelligence and Visualization certification and stay ahead of your contemporaries.