Business intelligence software and systems

A variety of different types of tools fall under the business intelligence umbrella.
The software selection service SelectHub breaks down some of the most
important categories and features:

 Dashboards
 Visualizations
 Reporting
 Data mining
 ETL (extract-transfer-load —tools that import data from one data store
into another)
 OLAP (online analytical processing)

Of these tools, SelectHub says the dashboards and visualization are by far the
most popular; they offer the quick and easy-to-digest data summaries that are
at the heart of BI's value proposition.

There are tons of vendors and offerings in the BI space, and wading through
them can get overwhelming. Some of the major players include:

 Tableau, a self-service analytics platform provides data visualization and

can integrate with a range of data sources, including Microsoft Azure
SQL Data Warehouse and Excel
 Splunk, a “guided analytics platform” capable of providing enterprise-
grade business intelligence and data analytics
 Alteryx, which blends analytics from a range of sources to simplify
workflows as well as provide a wealth of BI insights
 Qlik, which is grounded in data visualization, BI and analytics, providing
an extensive, scalable BI platform
 Domo, a cloud-based platform that offers business intelligence tools
tailored to various industries (such as financial services, health care,
manufacturing and education) and roles (including CEOs, sales, BI
professionals and IT workers)
 Dundas BI, which is mostly used for creating dashboards and
scorecards, but can also do standard and ad-hoc reporting
 Google Data Studio, a supercharged version of the familiar Google
Analytics offering
 Einstein Analytics, Salesforce.com’s attempt to improve BI with AI
 Birst, a cloud-based service in which multilple instances of the BI
software share a common data backend.

For a deeper look at today’s most popular business intelligence systems, see
"Top 12 BI tools of 2019" and "Top 10 BI data visualization tools."

Business intelligence analyst

Any company that's serious about BI will need to have business intelligence
analysts on staff. CIO.com has an in-depth article on what that job entails; in
general, they aim to use all the features of BI tools to get the data that
companies need, the most important being discovering areas of revenue loss
and identifying where improvements can be made to save the company money
or increase profits.

Even if your company relies on self-service BI tools on a day-to-day basis,

business intelligence analysts have an important role to play, as they are
necessary for managing and maintaining those tools and their vendors. They
also set up and standardize the reports that managers are going to be
generating to make sure that results are consistent and meaningful across your
organization. And to avoid garbage in/garbage out problems, business
intelligence analysts need to make sure the data going into the system is
correct and consistent, which often involves getting it out of other data stores
and cleaning it up.

Business intelligence analyst jobs often require only a bachelor's degree, at

least at the entry level, though to advance up the ranks an MBA may be helpful
or even required. As of October 2019, the median business intelligence salary is
around $67,500, though depending on your employer that could range from
$49,000 to $94,000.