

With this said, most major employers require at least a bachelor’s degree for business intelligence roles. Training of Business Intelligence Analystsīusiness intelligence analysts may come from a variety of academic backgrounds or be self taught. Let’s look at a few components of business intelligence analysis below. In short, business intelligence analysts take an organization’s data, and make it something more valuable in an effort to support business goals. That are used in the collection, analysis, integration, and presentation of information. So what does this have to do with the role of a business intelligence analyst? A quick look at what “business intelligence” is should make this clear. While elusive, wisdom is seen through “visionary” acts informed by information and knowledge. Application of a businesses’ values, providing vision into the future based on knowledge, and having the leadership to provide this vision are what wisdom is all about.

In a business setting, wisdom extrapolates from knowledge and faces the future. Wisdom can be seen as related to knowledge over time.Knowledge is knowing what to do with your information. Knowledge is often exhibited when information is provided to high-level decision makers or those experienced in their field. Put simply, knowledge answers “how” to implement or integrate understandings from information. Knowledge applies personal experience and mental rules (whether knowingly or unknowingly) to information. Knowledge is more abstract than information, but easy to identity when we see it.Following the example, once you know that 90% of your subscribers have kids and are in their 40’s, you can start to answer questions like “who, what, when, where.” Creating information through the processing and refining of data is a crucial portion of a business intelligence analyst’s role. Wrangling the data to provide percentages in certain age groups is information. A list of subscribers to a service and their ages is data. Information is data with a context, or that has been organized into a structure. Information is what many people mistakenly refer to as data.What many people commonly refer to as data is actually information. On it’s own it might as well be written in a language foreign to you. To fully illustrate this point, data is just a collection of symbols. Data in and of itself does not answer any meaningful questions, but is rather the material out of which answers can be constructed. Data includes logs, measures, addresses, phone numbers, names, number of clicks, and so forth, but without any interrelationships mapped.To illustrate this point, here are examples of what constitutes each step of the DIKW heirarchy: What do we mean by processed? Well that depends on how much (and how quality) the processing is. You see what we mentioned in the intro is true, but only using the popular conception of “data.” Technically, data in and of itself doesn’t tell us much until it’s processed. To show you what we mean, let us introduce the DIKW hierarchy. Data in and of itself isn’t worth that much, unless it can be coerced into something meaningful. Wait up a sec… we should add that data is just the start of all of that. Data is how you know your marketing worked, how you know it didn’t work, and how you know what to change in the future. If you’re reading this, you’re likely aware that data is currency in marketing.
