What is a business intelligence consultant?
First of all, in order to better understand what a business intelligence consultant is, it is important to define what business intelligence is. Sometimes the term business reporting is used. Business intelligence refers to IT techniques that aim to provide an overall view of data to decision-makers and company managers in order to facilitate their management. Indeed, a company can define a very relevant strategy by making the best use of the data it has. The data thus takes on its full meaning and provides the company with avenues for improvement thanks to the business intelligence consultant.
The business intelligence consultant, also known as BI consultant, is a position that is more and more in demand. The main role of the business intelligence consultant is to provide decision-makers in a company with a decision-making tool. It must analyze the situation and the difficulties of a company that decision-makers are facing. To achieve this, the BI consultant must understand their needs and try to bring a solution to their problem.
What are the missions of a business intelligence consultant?
BI consultants have many assignments with companies, including:
- Analyze business needs in terms of analysis reports or data reporting.
- Select relevant data, ideally using a data catalog.
- Préparer les données constitutives des rapports et cela, à plusieurs niveaux :
- Data mart,
- Data warehouse,
- Data hub or data lake, in the case of a big data architecture.
- Develop all integration processes, i.e. data transfers and processing from the original source to the final analysis report. Note that this function is increasingly entrusted to data engineers since the generalization of big data architectures.
- And above all, prepare analysis reports and graphical representation of data (also called data visualization or simply dataviz).
- Distribute and present the analysis reports to their sponsors.
If we have to remember the most important task of the BI consultant, it is to produce analysis reports and data visualizations in order to enlighten the decision-makers in (almost) real time on the situation of the company. The analysis of the environment outside the company is rather called economic intelligence.
The fact of exploiting all the data generated by the company, the environment, the customers, the products and the suppliers will enable it to find new opportunities or to avoid the pitfalls in order to make it more competitive.
When do companies need the services of a business intelligence consultant?
Companies wishing to continuously improve customer satisfaction are encouraged to follow the ISO 9001 standard. The latter considers that people, teams and processes should not work in silos, but as a coherent whole in order to achieve optimal performance. The decision making must then be based on evidence and in particular on numerical data reflecting reality.
The discipline that allows decision-makers in a company to monitor and improve the performance of its business processes is business intelligence. Thus, business intelligence refers to the means, digital tools and methods used to evaluate a company’s business processes and, consequently, to make them more efficient. Business intelligence is based on the mass of data generated by the company’s business processes and captured by its information system.
This is why a company needs a consultant who masters the techniques of business intelligence to help it make the most of the data generated by the business processes. This position is fundamental to the company. Indeed, if the company does not know how to monitor or analyze its business processes, it will not be able to improve its results and reach its objectives.
Note that decision-makers can misinterpret the indicators (also called key performance indicators or KPIs) and the data they have on their screen. Indeed, as information systems can be very complex, it is possible to get lost and not know where the data comes from. In addition, data quality is important. The use of poor quality data makes the reports inaccurate. That’s why hiring a business intelligence consultant is an excellent idea. He or she will be able to solve problems thanks to his or her mastery of business intelligence; but also thanks to the data catalog and data governance. A true data governance will allow to better know the data and consequently, to have new indicators, which will bring new business opportunities to the company.
At Data Éclosion, we are experts in data governance. If you would like to learn more about data governance, please visit our data governance page.
Business intelligence tools
In order to carry out these studies and analyze the data properly, there are many tools available. We will introduce you to some of them:
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence tool that helps find and share actionable information using data visualization. It also provides built-in artificial intelligence tools, Excel integration, and custom data connectors. It also allows you to create and share customized reports containing key performance indicators (KPIs).
Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics software that focuses on complex data understanding, personalization and integration of data with products. The user has a user-friendly and intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This allows complex tasks to be simplified.
Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is a business intelligence tool that focuses on a self-service approach. It offers a user-friendly interface optimized for touch screens, artificial intelligence tools and cloud support.
Your Data Éclosion business intelligence consultant
Data Éclosion is a French consulting firm. We help companies implement a digital strategy, as well as data governance. This is very important to be resilient to crises and more competitive in the market. We are experts and specialists in data governance. And so we can also help you as a business intelligence consultant. We have a great deal of experience that has allowed us to support medium-sized companies as well as multinationals. So, if you need a business intelligence consultant, don’t hesitate: contact us on our contact page. We will do everything necessary to meet your expectations.