Business Intelligence Consultant: evolutions and trends

Nicolas signs an article on the profession of BI consultant, his profession! Machine learning or customer relations, he talks about the qualities that, in his opinion, allow a BI consultant to stand out.

In the age of self-service BI, Big data, Machine Learning and other Cloud or DataLake, the era of hangars filled with BO developers generating thousands of reports each year seems distant.

BI" ("Business Intelligence" or "Business Intelligence") has evolved, and so has our business. But make no mistake, the essential is still there: A successful BI project is a project that is close to business needs, and therefore to end users. Therefore, being a "good" BI consultant is a good balance between technical skills and functional understanding, each obviously having more complicity with one or the other.

When asked what I do for a living, the answer is often perplexing... I now summarize my job in a simple sentence: "I recover computer data, which I transform into information, so that my customers benefit from it through decision-making."

Data recovery

Behind "computer data recovery" the first insider will see an ETL: SSIS, Talend, Informatica etc... Without going so far as to say that these tools are now obsolete, we live in a world that is evolving ever faster, and which is increasingly connected. Making a decision based on the previous day's data is sometimes too late.

Users increasingly need instant notifications and business intelligence increasingly needs technologies to recover and process data in real time. A technical expertise in Complex Event Processing (StreamInsight, Stream Analytics etc...) has now become a major asset for a BI consultant.

From data to information: Smart Data

Indeed, it is necessary to recover data but it is also necessary to transform them into information. It must therefore be taken into account that the restitution of the information that passes through, according to the recipient, on the one hand, the creation of a static report, a dashboard or an OLAP cube, and on the other hand, the transformation of the data into information, requires its enhancement.

Business management rules

But we cannot remain insensitive to the rise of Machine Learning in our businesses: consumption estimation, predictive maintenance, handwriting recognition, fraud detection, etc....

Many use cases open new horizons in the transformation of data into intelligent information. Here again, a BI consultant with complementary expertise in Machine Learning will be able to make the most of the opportunity to join tomorrow's BI projects.

Customer relations: an essential quality

The list of technical skills is of course not exhaustive and in continuous evolution, but a good BI consultant is not necessarily a great technician.

An important part of our consulting work focuses on customer relations: listening and understanding needs or imagining and proposing solutions.

Having a good functional understanding, knowing how to put yourself in the users' shoes, being a good trainer, having a taste for business, wanting to progress and make the different actors of a project progress are qualities that will definitely make a BI consultant stand out from the crowd.