Establishing 'Making it Happen' as a 'Formal & Predictable' Discipline

Leadership Competency Frame-work Components	Roles and Level based Competency Segregation

ENCYCLOPEDIA→ Enterprise Intelligence → - BI End-to-End → - Business Intelligence Management →

Business Intelligence organization roles

Business Intelligence has wide range of skills requirements, with uniform demands from Business, Process, Technology and HR. This page given the list of typical roles, responsibilities and skills required.

Here are the roles and skills required for end-to-end business Intelligence. One may not be able to get all the skills linked to a role, but can try to maximize the skill-set of the profile being hired for the job. A single person may be fulfilling multiple roles.

Head of Information Management OR Business Intelligence Manager

Roles and Responsibilities are:

Promotion of value of BI.
Education and awareness on BI to senior and middle level executives.
Building business-case for BI
Building BI Standards and associated templates
Interface across the stakeholders (including between Business and IT)
Vendor relations management
Owning the BI budget
Own the data-management linked to Business Intelligence.
Contractuals, Commercials, Licensing around BI
Owns the key performance indicators of Business Intelligence.

Skills:

Business and IT hybrid profile. If one has to choose, one needs to give priority to business back-ground.
Business Systems Analysis and modeling skills
Business process management
Business management experience OR a closely linked to business management.
Commercial Experience
Audit and Controls

The reason we have placed business back-ground as higher priority, is because BI is much more a business challenge than an IT challenge.

BI Business Analyst

This BI Analyst role has various shades. This BI Analyst role is a business role, who is the contact point for a function OR a process in terms of the data, process and information needs.

Roles and Responsibilities are:

Day to day business contact for a BI initiative
Drives Data Mapping and process mapping
Drives the impact analysis of any change in the BI business requirements OR design
Helps in creating the test plans and test criteria for business intelligence initiatives
Business Problem and root-cause analysis for any BI related issue

Skills:

Business subject matter expertise
Business System and Data Analysis
Audit and Control
Business Process Management
Financial Analysis

Data Steward

A Data Steward is not only a BI role, but a central role on the data management for the organization as a whole. This includes BI, Master Data Management, Transactional Data Management and Metadata Management etc. The core role for the data steward is to ensure that basic data elements in the organization are in good-shape, and they can be used for various purposes (including BI). In other words, data Steward is not only responsible for BI manager, but also to Chief Auditor, CFO, Business Heads, CIO as well. Data Steward works closely with the data custodians at functional level. Data Steward may also be the data custodian at the enterprise level. Typically the actual data custody responsibility falls upon individual custodians.

Roles and responsibilities:

Manage OR oversee data management initiatives related to Data Quality, Meta-Data and Data integration.
Drives the creation of data standards
Own enterprise data quality and data management Key Performance Indicators
Define the data grouping into domains like everyone use, use only for employees etc., based on enterprise policy. (For example- Collection data is for public use, Customer data is for employees..)
Define/ review the security access matrix for all systems being used in the given function. This security matrix defines the data access to all databases, programs and directories etc. in terms read/write/update/add/delete rights to individual OR business roles.
Undertake regular checks and ensure that all policies and procedures related to data quality are followed.
Initiate OR/and implement the data quality program for the function.

Skills

Business System analysis
Information Technology Management
Audit and Control
Business Process Management
Business Data Domain Expertise

You can refer making the best out of data steward role

BI Business Modeler

BI Modeler will be managing following kinds of modeling which is done in BI

Dimensional OR data warehouse modeling: Data Warehouse Dimensional Model is needed for a data warehouse, irrespective of the way you store the data (in de-normalized OR normalized way). The dimensional modeling is more of a business OR logical modeling on the dimensions, attributes, hierarchies and measures around which we want to build our information management.

OLAP Data modeling : As you store the data in form of multi-dimensional arrays, you will need to define on what data at what you want to store in OLAP and for what you want the users to drill down to the data warehouse. You also have to define on what different level of aggregation (pre-calculated summarization of the data) you need to build in an OLAP. This thinking is a combination of IT and business considerations. The starting piece is to understand the business requirements and translate the same into the OLAP model to be reviewed by IT.

Roles & Responsibilities:

Owning the BI modeling and getting it reviewed with the users
Managing the change requests and doing the impact analysis on Data Warehouse and OLAP
Working with stakeholders to do the upstream and downstream impact analysis of a change request. For example a change in Data Warehouse model could impact the ETL routines for getting the data from the source systems.

Skills

BI modeling, Dimensional modeling
End-to-end BI framework, and cross linkages across the components (from the source systems, ETL, staging, Data warehouse, OLAP, End-user tools..)
A solid Business and IT hybrid.

BI IT Designer OR IT specialist

A good part of the design aspects of BI are covered in Data Warehouse Design & Architecture. The Technical BI Designer is not a single role, as you will require different technical roles for different technical skills. For example:

Data Base Management & Administration Specialist
ETL specialist
Job control and Audit specialist..
Second and third level technical support on production issues
Change management support for impact analysis and estimation.

BI Production Support Manager

This role owns the production and change management for a BI platform. It can reside as a specialist role OR can be a part of IT. As much of the production issues related to business (problems with business meta-data, business rules, faulty data input etc..), it is advised that this role is positioned as a business-IT hybrid role

Roles and Responsibilities:

Owns production support as per the SLA
Vendor management for production support
Designing Helpdesk and production support procedures
Pro-active problem ticket management to reduce the potential production issues.
Root cause analysis and forwarding the ticket

Skills

Production Management
Vendor Management
Business and IT exposure.

BI Training and Development Manager

This role ensures the design and delivery of training to various stakeholders. The training and development is not only in the areas of BI roles, but to a great extent the end-user and super user roles. We have some pages dedicated to the training and development aspects of Business Intelligence. This role need not be an expert on BI (which could be an advantage, as one may be able to look at it from a user/layman point of view)

Roles and Responsibilities

Scoping the training needs
Designing the training program and training structure.
Develop the training content
Co-ordinate and own the delivering the training programs
Tracking the effectiveness of training programs and managing refreshers.
Develop train the trainer programs
Support in creating super users

Skills:

High level of BI understanding
Training and Development management
Business and Technology exposure

BI Commercial and Contractual (OR sourcing) Manager

This role manages the entire Business Intelligence external vendor commercials. This includes the outsourced development, production support and consulting work. It also includes the acquisition, licensing and annual maintenance of the BI components (like Data Warehouse server, OLAP server, Enterprise reporting platform..)

Roles and Responsibilities

Owns the Master Service Level Agreement (at Vendor relationship level in terms of pricing, SLA etc..)
Co-owns the work order contract (at individual engagement levels..) with the BI owner.
Manages any legal OR contractual issues with the Vendor.

Business Intelligence Asset Manager

This role owns and maintains all BI related assets. This role is like an IT asset manager, with a little different shade. A fair portion of the BI assets will be business meta-data. Maintaining the versions of business meta-data required a higher level understanding of business process and business perspectives.

Roles and Responsibilities

Own all hardware and operating system platforms linked with BI
Own all application programs (like ETL programs..)
Own all licensing regimes
Own all Meta-Data
Own all the data residing in the BI platform.
Support all activities linked to these assets like BI delivery, BI change management, BI production support