What is Business Intelligence? Its Function and Necessary Skills – Every organization that operates a business has to accurately track its business’s success. The availability of business intelligence is one tool that can be used to measure this performance.
What is Business Intelligence? Its Function and Necessary Skills
Maybe Binarian is still unfamiliar with the term business intelligence itself. Therefore, this time Binar will provide a complete explanation about business intelligence. Check it out below!
Understanding Business Intelligence (BI)
Before digging deeper, let’s first gather an understanding of ‘what is business intelligence’.
The term BI itself can refer to a profession and also refers to an activity carried out by a company. However, in this explanation, Binar will explain in more depth about business intelligence as a profession.
BI is a role in a company that is responsible for finding methods of analyzing information related to the company’s business.
A business intelligence person relies heavily on data to be able to carry out analysis and then convert it into new opportunities or breakthroughs to develop the company’s business.
This enormous responsibility makes business intelligence have an important position in a company.
In practice, BI is often equated with business analysis. Both are equally important but have fundamental differences. Business analysts only have duties limited to analyzing data, while business intelligence is required to present the results of their analysis.
Is Business Intelligence (BI) important for companies?
As mentioned in the previous point, BI is an important position in the company. This was concluded not without reason. There are several things that make the existence of BI very important in companies. Here are the details:
Companies must know how their performance and achievements are within a certain period of time. In this case BI helps companies to focus on the main vision.
Problems that occur in the company’s business must be identified early so that they do not escalate and tend to be easier to handle.
This is the task of BI, namely providing explanations regarding company performance problems.
Companies have data, but it cannot be utilized optimally without the existence of Business Intelligence.
Skills that a Business Intelligence Person Must Have
The position of BI in a company is so important, it is not surprising that the salaries offered are generally higher. Does this make you interested in pursuing a business intelligence profession?
If you are really interested in this profession, there are several skills you must have. You must have the hard and soft skills below before becoming a business intelligence officer.
1. Microsoft Excel
Excel is an application from Microsoft intended for data processing. Apart from being able to process data, this application also provides options for easily presenting or visualizing data.
MS Excel can also be categorized as one of the most basic applications that can be used to process data. That’s why you should master Excel before becoming a business intelligence officer. If you have mastered Excel, learning other tools will be easier. To further validate your skills in data processing, you can consider taking Microsoft Excel certification
2. SQL
Work as a business intelligence officer has a very close relationship with data. You need to know that to process data, not only Excel can be used. At a higher level, you need SQL to process data.
SQL itself is short for Structured Query Language. With SQL, you can perform various data manipulations starting from creating, reading, editing and deleting it. These manipulations are more often called CRUD.
3. Analysis
One of the important soft skills that a business intelligence must have is analytical skills. Apart from being closely related to data, this profession cannot be separated from analysis.
Someone with good analytical skills tends to think more critically. This is very necessary for a business intelligence person to be able to analyze company data well. Responsibilities that must be fulfilled can also be completed more quickly.
4. Communication Skills
The last skill that a business intelligence person should not miss is communication. As you already know, a business intelligence person is not only tasked with analyzing data. They are also required to be able to communicate the results of their analysis with other related parties.
That’s why communication skills are very important to have. You must be able to convey the results of the analysis so that they can be understood well by interested parties.
BI Workflow
Discussing BI is still incomplete if you don’t know the system or work flow. It turns out that business intelligence has quite a lot of work to do.
The business intelligence workflow is divided into 3 main steps, namely ETL, data warehouse, and BI results. Listen to the explanation again, Binarian~
1. ETL
The earliest process is extract, transform, load (ETL) which aims to obtain data. You can’t get the data directly, but there are several stages you have to go through, namely:
Data validation is getting data that is really needed and valid.
Data cleaning is carried out to standardize data so that there is no duplicate data or data redundancy. For example, the writing of Jogjakarta, Jogja, and Yogyakarta was unified to become Yogyakarta.
Data transformation is the process of modifying existing data. For example, adding a new column, changing the data type if necessary, or combining one data with another.
Data aggregation is carried out if necessary. An example is using the count, average, or sum commands.
Data loading is the process of transferring data into storage or data warehouse.
2. Data Warehouse
The data warehouse is a storage place for all databases that have been obtained from the first stage. Here BI divides the data warehouse into several data marts as needed.
3. Process BI Results
The final work process is to use data generated from the previous process for various purposes. Some examples include:
More in-depth analysis
Mining more data to find certain patterns. This pattern will later be used to make predictions.
Data visualization, for example in graphic form.
Provide a warning to the company.
Today’s intense business competition requires companies to continuously monitor to develop their business. That is the reason why BIis a very important position in a company.
