The Big Deal about Business Intelligence

How are recruiting companies and human resources organizations gearing up for one of the most sought-after skills in the industry? Is there a plan to meet the skills gap identified in this space? Business Intelligence is the lifeline of innovative businesses, it dictates the direction companies go as they seek to innovate or die. BI connects information to better decision-making; it answers pertinent business questions relating to what just happened, why it happened, and what will happen next. Every business (frankly, every individual, including myself) wants to be able to predict the future – oh, want I’ll do with this information! This ability can be acquired through what’s known as predictive analysis.

It is a big deal to be able to predict the future with technology.

Warren Buffett has been quoted to say: If past history was all there was to the game, then the richest people would be librarians.

Predicting the future with BI is an escalating process that starts off with analyzing the current events taking place in a business and continues with why these events are taking place; then and only then can we predict what will happen next. The skill sets and knowledge needed increase as we move up the process. For the first process, its skill sets are found in scrutinizing analytical dashboard applications such as Cognos Dashboards. The skills for the second process are ad-hoc querying and data mining of OLAP data. The third process, ‘predicting what will happen next, is where it begins to get a little sticky? What kinds of skills do we need here? Is it a combination of statistics, data modeling, development, program management, business domain expertise, and data mining?

I’m stopping here, but there’s more to this…