Data Analytics & BI

Business analysts, BI developers, analytics engineers

Data analytics is the practice of collecting, transforming and organising data so that organisations can draw conclusions, make predictions and have the information they need to drive decision-making. Data analysis is not the same thing, but instead is a subcategory of data analytics: it deals specifically with extracting meaning from data. As a whole, though, data analytics goes beyond just analysis and includes data science and engineering.

Business analysts work within an organisation to bridge their business needs and their available technology solutions to those needs. They look at processes, learn about the functional requirements of different stakeholders and come up with data driven strategies to improve performance. They make sure that technical teams are building the right things to solve specific problems. Business analysts carry out interviews and workshops, documenting user stories and specifications. They creat flowcharts to get a sense of current workflows and think about how to improve them. They carry out data analysis, looking at performance metrics and trends. They engage in stakeholder management, explaining the risks and benefits of processes, technologies and procedures to both developers and organisational leaders. They assist with User Acceptance Testing (UAT) so that they can be sure solutions function properly before they are launched.

Business intelligence (BI) developers are data professionals who transform raw information into insights that organisations can use to make decisions. They are responsible for designing and maintaining data pipelines, models and visualisation dashboards. They structure the data so it can be easily retrieved, and make sure that visuals are interactive and accessible, and form useful reports. They develop Extracting, Transforming and Loading processes that get data from different sources into a centralised warehouse. They also deal with data governance, and manage permissions and data security.

Analytics engineers are the intersection between data engineers who build the pipelines and the data analysts who visualise insights. They take raw data which can be messy and hard to interpret, and transform it into clean, reliable and standardised data models that can be used for reporting.