Trends and Outliers
TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog
Category Archives: Business Intelligence Education
2011
Top Data Analysts Must ‘Speak the Language of the Business’
Analytics professionals do best if they can succeed in three types of skills: technical, business thinking and “intangibles,” according to Kaiser Fung (@junkcharts), Vice President of Strategic Analytics at Sirius XM Radio, and the author of Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do.
Fung points out that business thinking – how to teach data analysts to talk to the business in language the business understands - is often the hardest to develop because colleges and grad schools (outside of business schools) just don’t teach it. For him, intangibles are the hardest to find, mainly because it’s impossible to gauge them in an interview.
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2011
The Future of Business Intelligence is in Education
Richard Herschel, chair of the decisions & systems science department at St. Joseph’s University worked with BeyeNETWORK (@BeyeNETWORK) earlier this year to survey 79 BI professionals for the first-ever state of business intelligence.
25% of Companies BI Capabilities “Inadequate”
The survey results point out some key trends in business intelligence – specifically around BI’s role in the organization and the demand for BI education and services. The most intriguing fact from the survey is that a quarter of respondents believe their “BI capabilities are inadequate.”
The open-ended comments suggest the reason is a lack of expertise and data integration. The survey also shows evidence of an urgent need in business intelligence – more education as services expand. Before we hit on how this affects the organization, it’s important to understand how companies use BI tools.
How BI Is Used in the Organization
Herschel writes that the BI is used in decision support at all levels of the organization with product, market and trend analysis as the leading uses in the strategic arena. In tactical uses, we’re seeing a wide range of performance management, marketing, forecasting, and planning alongside profitability measurements. To round out the operational uses, it’s widespread in financials and sales analytics.
As far as dominant applications go, the survey showed dashboards, decision support and data mining were leading responses.
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