Business Intelligence Analysts analyze the data associated with the performance of a company to provide insights, assess risk & more.
Written by Bailey Reiners
Published on Mar. 04, 2019
While Business Intelligence Analysts would certainly be flattered to have their work compared to the great actor Morgan Freeman, their voices resonate with radically different crowds. Business Intelligence Analysts are experts at diving deep into large sets of raw data and analyzing it to help stakeholders across teams improve business performance.
Their extensive knowledge on data analytics provides them with the ability to speak highly technical with data scientists and engineers and translate the same conversation into layman's terms for non-technical stakeholders.
Learn more about how to write a Business Intelligence Analysts job description in this article with examples a template and salary information.
Table of Contents
Business Intelligence (BI) Analysts analyze the internal and external data associated with the performance of a company. They provide business insights across teams to help make informed decisions, assess risks and stay ahead of industry trends.
They typically have several years of experience as a business consultant or market research analyst, in addition to a Bachelor's degree in a STEM field, marketing, psychology, accounting or business management. Many companies hire internal BI Analysts, though the role is also very common in the consulting industry.
To better understand the internal business, BI Analysts are tasked with mining raw data across the company with the use of software. They then analyze and convert the data into actionable business performance goals and risk assessments. This information helps internal teams across the board make informed decisions and improve processes.
In order to provide the most insightful information, BI Analysts also conduct market surveys and compare internal findings against competitors to assess performance in relation to industry and market trends and better understand why clients and customers chose one product or service over another.
They also act as a translator between technical and non-technical stakeholders to them help make use of the data in terms that they understand, as demonstrated in the cartoon below.
With today’s technology, there is a plethora of business intelligence software available for the various tasks associated with collecting data and putting it to good use. To help you become more familiar with the lingo associated with business intelligence, we’ve broken down the different types of software Business Intelligence Analysts utilize to provide the most detailed and accurate insights.
Data Mining
In order to analyze business data, first BI Analysts must mine or extract raw data from its source and convert it into organized and comprehensive datasets. These are a few of the common data mining tolls used by Business Intelligence Analysts.
Data Warehousing
Data warehousing systems help Business Intelligence Analysts report on the data they mine. These systems combine the input of multiple different sources to provide comprehensive reporting across business initiatives.
- Amazon Redshift
- Arm Treasure Data
- Oracle Database
- SAP Business Warehouse
- Sisense
Data Cleansing
Once data is collected in a data warehouse, it may require cleansing to remove any inaccurate, incomplete or false information. Data cleansing tools help BI Analysts refine their data to ensure it’s as accurate and ‘clean’ as possible. Again, here are a few of the top data cleansing tools you should know.
Data Visualization
To better understand what the data means and tell a story behind it, BI Analysts utilize data visualization tools to create easily digestible representations of their data. This can come in handy when relaying information to teams across the business who may or may not have tech-heavy roles or backgrounds. Here are a few data visualization software to be familiar with.
Coding Languages
In addition to analyzing data, Business Intelligence Analysts need to have a basic understanding of the specific coding languages a business utilizes. This helps them better assess how a business can make changes and how to prioritize tasks among different teams.
Alright, we’ve covered the basics, let’s take it a step further. We’ve collected five stellar job descriptions from seven of the top hiring markets in the US. These will provide you with a strong understanding of what is expected of a Business Intelligence Analyst.
We've redacted some information to protect the privacy of the companies that originally posted these job descriptions.
We are looking for a Business Intelligence Analyst to join our [redacted] team. [redacted] are looking for curious data-minded individuals to build management reports and dashboards, design data models, and identify opportunities to use data and analytics to improve operational performance.
The ideal candidate will be highly motivated, reliable, detailed, and driven to produce high quality work. This individual must thrive in an entrepreneurial, fast-paced environment.
What we will want you to do:
Monitor and dissect performance across our digital channels—become the “go-to” expert on channel and segment trends
- Develop management reports and dashboards for stakeholders across all business functions: marketing, product, technology, operations.
- Perform in-depth analysis to identify key business risks and opportunities and make recommendations to improve overall profitability.
- Distill complex data and relationships into clear, concise charts and visualizations.
- Contribute insight to strategic and tactical decisions that impact competitive position, marketing mix, product design, analytics, and operations.
- Implement key recommendations by identifying cross-functional stakeholders, developing requirements, ensuring accurate implementation, monitoring impact, and optimizing results.
- Design data models to extract data from operational databases and transform the data to easily understood business views.
- Gather and process raw data at scale (including writing scripts, web scraping, calling API’s, write SQL queries, etc.)
- Process unstructured data into a form suitable for analysis- then do the analysis.
Skills or Experience we want you to have:
- BS/MS degree in an analytical or data driven discipline
- A minimum of 2 -4 years analytics experience [redacted]
- Experience with business intelligence reporting tools, preferably Looker
- Exceptional SQL skills, strong knowledge of relational databases, and the ability to build and maintain database views
- Ability to perform complex quantitative analysis and translate results into meaningful business insights
- Have demonstrated verbal and written communication skills, and ability to interface with Business, Analytics, and IT organizations
Bonus points if you have:
- Experience with PostgreSQL, Redshift, and/or Greenplum databases
- Experience with data driven programming (R, Python/Pandas, SAS, etc.)
- Experience working with Git
We are looking for someone who has both the deep technical skills to automate processes and is just as comfortable reviewing the data and discussing it with executives. Ideally, you have experience supporting research initiatives including basic statistical analysis. Developing and executing solid analytical solutions is crucial to this role, so we’d love to hear about your successes. If you get excited about making information functional and accessible and have experience within a SaaS organization (preferably with both web and mobile), we’re excited to talk with you!
What will I be doing?
- Design and develop reporting assets that provide consistent, reliable and automated delivery of data, internally and to our Partners.
- You will be the SME, champion and developer of Tableau analytics
- Be our ‘go to’ expert for information and knowledge of our user engagement
- Provide analytics that identifies usage across user segments and product features
- Partner with business stakeholders to set clear business KPIs and build dashboards that provide timely and strategic insights
- Collaborate across the organization to build solutions that serve multiple areas of the business
- Independently design interactive analytic solutions
- Work independently on end to end solutions, from data investigation to visual dashboards
- Troubleshoot production issues and performance tuning
- Ability to take abstract analytical problems and deliver results quickly and accurately
- Support key research initiatives that might include managing and analyzing user panels, statistical data analysis and creation of written report summarizing outcomes
- Automate key reporting processes
What experience & Skill do I need?
- 5-8 years proven experience in business intelligence reporting
- Expert level and advanced experience in Tableau data visualization toolset as a developer, architecting data models, administration and as a SME
- Solid experience in programming languages (R or Perl)
- Strong with SQL for data interrogation and transformation, a robust understanding of relational data and the ability to manipulate fact data along multiple dimensions.
- Strong communication (written and oral)
- Current with new tools and software to promote on-going innovation
- Exude integrity, thought leadership, ambition, and reliability
- Strong attention to detail, ability to multi-task and work independently
- Experience managing projects within an agile environment
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering or relevant degree
- A seasoned Ruby or Python & SQL developer with experience building ETL pipelines for transforming relational data into a reportable fact data in a data warehouse.
- Expertise with version control systems, like Git
[redacted] are looking for a a motivated Business Intelligence Analyst with strong technical skills and business acumen to help turn millions of potential data points into actionable insights that can drive product improvements, make our customer acquisition more efficient, improve our customer retention rates, and drive operating efficiencies on our production and logistics teams.
What kind of person are we looking for?
- You love extracting, wrangling, organizing, and analyzing complex data sets to find a story that will enable better, faster, and more informed decision making across the company.
- You believe learning should be fun and seek to empower each employee [redacted] with the information, benchmarks, metrics, and insights that they need to be independently successful in their roles.
- You strive for optimization, automation, and continuous improvement, knowing that what is currently being done can always be improved.
- You are creative, flexible, and supremely detail-oriented but never lose sight of the big picture. It would never occur to you to say, “that’s not my job”.
- You are comfortable in an environment of high-growth and ambiguity.
In a typical week, you will:
- Collaborate with teams from the Marketing, Product, Engineering, Sales, Menu, and Finance departments to set internal benchmarks, develop critical metrics for new initiatives, and recommend continuous improvement strategies using data-driven insights.
- Design, develop, test, automate, and launch new dashboards and reporting solutions across the company.
- Maintain and support existing metrics, KPIs, reports and dashboards.
- Identify, analyze, and interpret trends or patterns in complex data sets and report findings and make recommendations to company leadership.
- Work with the Business Intelligence and Engineering teams to understand existing internal tools and data warehouses and to identify data quality and reliability improvements and to establish best practices.
- Support demand/inventory planning, sales and location forecasts, production planning, and predictive modeling efforts.
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, (STEM Education preferred)
- Experience in programming languages, preferably R or Python
- Experience in SQL experience for data extraction, manipulation and analyses; including complex joins.
- Experience in data visualization
- Intermediate to excellent Excel capabilities (pivot, vlookup, VBA, etc.)
- Knowledge of statistics and experience using statistical packages for analyzing data
- Strong prioritization and communication skills
- High level of analytical and problem-solving skills with strong attention to details
[redacted] is looking for a Business Intelligence Analyst whose primary responsibility will be to work on the Corporate Growth and Executive Management team to provide data analytics and reporting to the various functions [redacted]. This includes implementing solutions for optimizing and automating existing reporting as well as leveraging tools such as SQL and Tableau to create and monitor new key performance indicators and operational metrics. This is a great opportunity for someone who is interested in working alongside a fast-paced, data-driven team to help the organization achieve its strategic objectives.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Tackle complex business problems by converting raw data into meaningful and actionable business insights. Collaborate directly with peers and business leaders to transform ideas into actions.
- Utilize Microsoft SQL Server for extraction and analysis of data from multiple sources with demonstrated ability to effectively decipher, analyze and report data
- Develop reports and dashboards using Tableau and/or Excel for internal and external customers
- Leverage analytic problem solving skills in working with large disparate, datasets to report portfolio operational metrics and performance
- Assist with preparation and automation of recurring / ad hoc reporting assignments
- Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems, Finance, Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering or related quantitative discipline
- 1-2 years’ experience analyzing data, drawing conclusions and making recommendations; consulting or financial services industry experience is a plus
- Strong SQL query writing skills required. Experience working in a Microsoft SQL Server environment is preferred.
- Experience with creating and presenting management dashboards and reports
- Experience with data visualization/business intelligence tools. Experience with Tableau is a huge plus.
- Strong Microsoft Excel skills
- Ability to be flexible and work in a fast paced environment
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- Ability to meet established timelines
- Analytical mindset and passion for gleaning actionable insights from raw data
- Knowledge of at least one other programming language such as Python is a plus
- Knowledge of data warehousing and ETL concepts is a plus
[redacted] is seeking a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst to perform deep analytical work, providing both the analysis and recommendations for our internal teams. In this newly created role, this Analyst will be tasked to source data and analyze the business impacts of various initiatives in partnership with many groups, mainly focused on Finance, Operations, and Engineering.
Our ideal candidate will be detail-oriented, a strong communicator, incredibly curious, and technically capable with a desire to discover and deliver data-driven business insights. This role is critical to fuel our data-driven culture and to help us make informed business decisions.
- A collaborative learning culture: we work as a team to figure out solutions to the technological challenges of the day
- We focus on improving our customer’s experience every day, all the while taking the time necessary to make sure we do things the best we can
- We celebrate innovation and want every member at [redacted] to have the power to experiment and find novel, effective solutions
- Perform analyses and build reports using Looker and other reporting tools that will drive business outcomes at [redacted]
- Conduct ad-hoc analytics requests using the internal data warehouse in Redshift, Microsoft Excel, and Looker
- Build Looker ML (design) and explorer to support self-service and dashboards
- Define reporting requirements in partnership with various team and translate that into technical specifications to build a comprehensive analytics solution
- Prep data for analytics using Python and other SQL tools
- Partner with our data engineering and technical teams to ensure that our data is accurate in our databases for reporting & analysis
- Build Looker dashboards that provide solid recommendations to business partners based on data insights
- Run statistical analysis and data mining as needed using Python (Jupyter notebook) and other statistical tools
- Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Information Technology or another technical field
- 3+ years of documented experience in a related analytical role
- Expert knowledge and ability to leverage SQL queries to surface data from source systems and build reports
- Proven success in delivering impactful insights and data visualization using Looker and other BI reporting tools including Tableau, Pentaho, or Microstrategy
- Excellent communicator and interest in leading projects
- Experience with relational databases (Oracle, MySQL), cloud data platform (Redshift) & other business intelligence tools
- Advanced skills in MS Excel, including pivot tables, formulas, and charting
- Understanding of e-commerce or subscription business models
- Good to have Knowledge of various Merch planning platforms
- Experience working with Python, R and similar tools for data mining is a plus!
Hopefully with the overview and examples you’ve gained a strong understanding of what it takes to be a Business Intelligence Analyst, and more importantly, what to look for when hiring your next team member. To make sense of everything we’ve covered so far and provide you with a jumping off point, we've also created a comprehensive Business Intelligence Analyst job description template to get you started.
Again, this is at template, so feel free to take it and make adjustments to create a more tailored and accurate representation of your company, culture and the role.
[Use this section to provide a high level overview of your company, culture, perks and benefits, career development opportunities and anything else that will get candidates excited about your company.]
- Utilize [insert BI software] to collect essential data related to the success of the business and provide insightful solutions to areas of weakness.
- Analyze raw data, perform complex quantitative analysis, assess risk and convert it into actionable business goals.
- Have the ability to tell a story with the data once it’s analyzed and present it for key stakeholders to understand a in meaningful and comprehensive manner.
- Collaborate with internal teams to bring ideas to fruition, set benchmarks, assess risk and coordinate solutions with Marketing, Product, Technology, Operations, Sales and Finance.
- Provide individual team members with the knowledge and resources to independently understand metrics and make informed decisions.
- Act as a knowledge resource for internal questions, concerns and ideas around business solutions within each department.
- Stay in tune with industry trends and competitor data to ensure our product/service remains an industry leader.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Finance, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Technology, Economics, Management Information Systems or related STEM field.
- X years experience in business intelligence reporting or analytics.
- X years experience managing projects.
- Exceptional written, verbal and presentation skills with the ability to relay highly technical information to both industry experts and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong knowledge of [insert Business Intelligence platform or software].
- Well-versed in programming languages [insert essential languages].
- Experience with reporting tools, like [insert reporting tools].
Congrats, you’ve made it to the final stage of your job description — the salary info. While you may not consider this an essential part of the job description, consider this:
The fourth most common reason people leave their current job is to pursue a higher salary. Don’t wait until the job offer to inform candidates about one of the top reasons they want to join your company. Below we've provided the average salaries for Business Intelligence Analysts in our seven markets to help you dial in your offer.
- Austin, TX: $96,222
- Boston, MA: $74,250
- Chicago, IL: $88,471
- Colorado: $80,967
- Los Angeles, CA: $88,250
- New York, NY: $87,472
- Seattle, WA: $91,500
Cross Market Average Salary for an Business Intelligence Analyst: $86,733
