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10 Essential Skills for Business Analysts in 2024

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10 Essential Skills for Business Analysts in 2024

10 Essential Skills for Business Analysts in 2024

In modern business terrain, business analysts play a crucial role in driving business success. Companies strive for data-driven insights, and streamlined processes and only skillful business analysts can cater to these needs. In this article, we will discuss about 10 essential skills that are essential for business analysts to thrive in today’s complex business environment.

Business Intelligence Tools:

BI tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, and Microsoft Power BI serve as a bridge between raw data and actionable insights. SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, and Microsoft Power BI are all prominent BI platforms that facilitate the transformation of complex datasets into easily digestible and visually engaging formats. Business analysts leverage these tools to present key performance indicators, trends, and patterns in a manner that is accessible to stakeholders.

Data Analysis:

Proficiency in data analysis tools and techniques is essential for business analysts to extract valuable insights from large datasets. Expertise in SQL allows analysts to interact with databases, executing queries to retrieve and manipulate data. Microsoft Excel serves as a versatile tool for data organization and preliminary analysis. It also provides a familiar interface for tasks such as data cleaning and basic computations. Furthermore, the utilization of data visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI enhances the communicative aspect of data analysis.

Requirement Management Software:

Requirements management tools play a crucial role in the systematic handling of project requirements from inception to completion. JIRA is a widely used tool for project management and issue tracking. Confluence, on the other hand, is a collaborative platform that allows teams to create, share, and collaborate on documents. IBM Rational DOORS offers capabilities for capturing, tracking, and analyzing requirements in a structured manner. Proficiency in these tools enables business analysts to document project requirements, which ensures that all stakeholders have a clear understanding of what needs to be achieved.

SQL:

Database knowledge and SQL proficiency is crucial when dealing with structured data. Business analysts often engage with large volumes of structured data, and a solid understanding of both relational databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle DB, as well as NoSQL databases, is deemed essential. Relational databases are fundamental to data storage and retrieval in many organizations, and business analysts are expected to be adept at working with them. The ability to write and execute SQL commands is crucial, as it enables analysts to access, retrieve, manipulate, and analyze data effectively.

Process Modeling:

Business analysts are expected to possess knowledge of process modeling techniques, especially BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). Additionally, proficiency in process analysis tools such as ARIS or Visio is crucial for effectively mapping, analyzing, and improving business processes.

 

Read more at 10 Business Analyst Skills Ensuring Business Success in 2024

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Is ETL Development doomed?

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Is ETL Development doomed?

There seems to be a couple of tracks for this. First is the pure development automation tools, such as Varigence MIST. If you are technically minded, take a look at this product demo video – though I suggest skipping to about 25 minutes in to see the real meat as it does go on a bit. It looks mindbogglingly powerful but is clearly shooting at the ETL pro who wants to churn stuff out faster, more consistently and with less fiddling about. MIST is limited to SSIS/AS (for now) and I’m not sure how far it will go as it’s clearly aimed at the developer pro market, which is not always the big buyers. I expect to be playing with it more over the next few weeks on a live project so should be able to get a better view.

The second path appears to be more targeted at eliminating ETL developers in their entirety. AnalytixDS wraps up metadata import (i.e. you suck in your source and target metadata from the systems or ERWIN), do the mapping of fields and apply rules, then “push button make code”. Obviously there’s a bit more to it than that, but the less you care about your back end and the quality of your ETL code (cough Wherescape cough) the more likely this product will appeal to you. Say hello, business users, who are the big buyers (though I look forward to troubleshooting your non-scalable disasters in the near future).

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Business Intelligence Barista: Mixing your choice of BI Coffee with Tableau, Power BI or Qlikview?

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Business Intelligence Barista: Mixing your choice of BI Coffee with Tableau, Power BI or Qlikview?

Choosing a Business Intelligence is a bit like making coffee for the whole company. Everybody likes it their way, and they want it right now. Plus, everybody wants it differently. So, given that everyone has different requirements, how do you go about keeping everybody happy? If you think about how hard it is to keep everyone happy when you’re just making coffee, think how hard it is to select a business Intelligence solution. Not just any solution…. the *right* solution. 

So, given that everyone has different requirements, how do you go about keeping everybody happy? If you think about how hard it is to keep everyone happy when you’re just making coffee, think how hard it is to select a business Intelligence solution. Not just any solution…. the *right* solution. The one that will keep everyone happy and give them what they want. The solution that will keep the ambulance away from the door, where constraints must be met or there will be serious trouble. The solution that will keep everyone out of danger whilst making sure that the sprinkle lovers get their sprinkles, and the folks who like a chocolate covered spoon in their coffee get a little chocolate covered spoon – in milk, dark or white…

Hopefully this article could provide an insight for you to decide the best BI tools for you company. If you would like to know further, or if you have any question, please contact us or leave us comments below.

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