Tuesday, August 03, 2010

What is Business Intelligence ( or Microsoft Business Intelligence ) and are you a BI professional ?

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Database professionals many a times feel the dilemma in the classification of the work they do. I even find many professionals literally bragging that they are BI professionals and they would want to work only in BI and nothing else. Many a times as an interviewer when I check the candidate's profile, it seems that the candidate has developed a couple of SSIS packages for import-export kind of requirements, and so he has the medal on his chest of being a BI professional. I would think that SSIS is still somewhat elegant, some even argue that they have been developing SSRS reports since a while and so they are BI professionals. That sounds like a more interesting argument, doesn't it ? Some even say that they don't know T-SQL development and they work exclusively in SSIS. I think this is the biggest blunder statement that I have ever heard in SSIS business.

Below are a few questions that my mind raises when one claims of being a BI professional.

1) Are you aware of Data Warehousing concepts ?

2) Working with SSIS / SSRS makes or running a wizard to create a Cube makes you a BI professional or is there more weight in your justification ?

3) Are you aware of ETL strategy, design and development concepts ?

4) How many data warehousing or analytics projects have you executed in your career ?

5) How many dashboards have you designed to facilitate decision support as a part of any business solution ?

6) What tangible / measurable value did your BI solution bring to the business, and what was your contribution in the solution development and design ?

7) What you have been doing with SSIS, is that something that can't be done using T-SQL, provided I take out the factors of automation and ease of maintenance ?

8) How many competitive BI tools and technologies are you aware of and how many of them have you technically evaluated ?

9) Have you used SSIS just in data migration projects or you have used SSIS to populate a data warehouse and process cubes ?

10) How good are you are gathering requirements, analyze data at hand and able to foresee a way to extract patterns or intelligence out of it ?

If after the above questions, your answer still stands to "I work in SSIS / SSRS / SSAS so I am a Business Intelligence professional", I would say "All that glitters is not gold, and all who work on SSIS / SSRS / SSAS are not BI professionals". Thoughts are welcome !!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

An eye opener!

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