As any other team, Business Intelligence (BI), or Data Warehousing (DWH) teams also have different roles, purpose and responsibilities. Most of Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) people outside BI or DWH fields don’t understand them, as they are to be honest quite complex. For example, it is quite usual that somebody from Business Department asks BI Solution Designer or BI Architect to fix small issue or a problem encountered while browsing specific report, not knowing the actual domain responsibility of mentioned roles. This can cause frustration on both sides of communication.
I even met a lot of IT professionals actually working in the fields of BI and DWH, which don’t understand completely their role and what is expected from them at enterprise level. It can be quite hard for such people to define personal career path and to think about individual plans for the future inside respective enterprise.
I also had a chance to speak with numerous recruiters from different agencies recruiting for BI or DWH jobs, which as well had no clear understanding what they actually advertise and for which kind of a job they actually seek potential candidates.
In that context, as a part of overall research project at Staffordshire University, I identified groups and roles relevant for BI or DWH teams, which could help professionals, recruiters, academics and others to avoid misunderstanding in the future.
Based on literature review, my industrial experience, discussions with other BI and DW (Data Warehouse) domain experts, and by analysing eight large companies having BI in Austria and Germany, I identified four groups and 10 different user roles relevant for BI. To avoid redundancy caused by different naming of the same user roles in various companies, I based my categorization on their actual activities. Table 1 presents identified user groups and roles, and provides description of relevant activities for each of them. This table is published as a part of scientific journal article “Measuring the success of changes to Business Intelligence solutions to improve Business Intelligence reporting” in Journal of Management Analytics, Volume 4, Issue 2, pages 1 – 15, 2017 [1].
If have any suggestions based on your knowledge or experience to extend, modify or remove any information provided in Tables 1, please do not hesitate to contact me.
References:
- (2017) Measuring the success of changes to Business Intelligence solutions to improve Business Intelligence reporting, Journal of Management Analytics, 4:2, 130-144, DOI: 10.1080/23270012.2017.1299048