The core responsibilities of a Business Intelligence (BI) developer are to design, develop, release, and maintain BI tools and infrastructure. BI developers are also responsible for streamlining complex technical language and information that can be understood without technical expertise.
According to the Data Bridge Market Research report titled “Global Business Intelligence Market – Industry Trends and Forecast to 2030,” the business intelligence market was valued at USD 27.11 billion in 2022 and will reach USD 58.75 billion by 2030, scaling at a CAGR of 10.15% during the predicted years from 2023 to 2030.
The business intelligence market is scaling exponentially, and businesses will have a high demand for BI developers to accomplish their goals. Developers can enhance their skill sets to fit in according to the latest market demand. The article will explore the responsibilities of BI developers and the skills they require to scale.
BI Developer Responsibilities
The scope of the planned project will determine the degree of involvement of a specific role.
Designing, developing, and deploying BI interfaces needs profound experience in software engineering, databases, and data analysis. Data engineers will be a perfect fit for the role.
In addition, developers need to understand that business intelligence tools require several industry-specific functionalities. Additionally, they also need to be well-versed in business-oriented peculiarities.
It is one of the best ways to determine the business need and enforce proper data prototypes and represent tools.
Here are a few core responsibilities of a BI developer:
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Understanding the Business Need for BI Tools
Developers must understand that Business intelligence will always be a limited domain to achieve organizational requirements for data analysis. Hence the need and scope of BI tools can differ for enterprises.
For instance, a healthcare institution needs to gather, process, and evaluate a large amount of annual medical examination data. An eCommerce platform will gather, store, process, and evaluate customer data. In both cases, the BI developers must design, develop and deploy a robust business intelligence platform.
However, the purpose of developing the BI platform will differ, and developers need to know the purpose before they embark on a BI application development journey. The purpose of the BI application development will define the need and number of reporting functionalities.
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Translating business needs into technical
Once the developers determine and document business requirements, data engineers/ETL/front-end developers must translate, the business needs into technical tasks.
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Lead the BI Software Design, Development, Deployment, and Maintenance
BI developers have to execute a role of a technical lead in a BI application development team or complete actual developer tasks. Developers excelling in business intelligence can make strategic decisions on developed software from design to deployment. In the pre or post-launch stages of the BI application, BI developers are also responsible for testing and debugging.
Collating reports, curation, and developing a data model also become a part of developer responsibilities. They might have to design a data warehouse to ensure the data stored for BI tools is accurate, segmented, and accessible.
Moreover, BI developers must document this data in the data warehouse and meta-data storage to ensure that information is safe during migration. Creating technical documentation for the BI interface is a crucial responsibility of BI development teams. Developers need to have a set of skill sets to achieve the above set of responsibilities.
Required BI Developer Skillset
The skill sets required for a BI developer varies as per the project, and is based on the scope. In a few cases, BI developers communicate less with the software engineering teams. In such cases, they act as SQL specialists to enable proper querying. Here are the skillsets BI developers require:
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Hands-on Experience with BI Tools
BI developers must have experience building customer BI products or configuring the current tools in the tech stack. To develop customized BI solutions, developers need to better understand Python and scripting languages, with the skills of managing data visualization libraries.
Moreover, they also need an in-depth understanding of underlying infrastructure, including warehouse architecture, data integration solutions, ETL/ELT procedures, and data formatting.
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DB/DBA experience
One of the crucial reasons why BI developers should have expertise in managing databases is because of SQL/NoSQL queries. Business intelligence tools often need to deal with databases, data models, or data distribution in multiple databases.
To scale as developers in BI tools, they should have the skillsets to design and develop tools for online analytical processing (OLAP cubes). It is one of the most effective multidimensional analysis methods that leverages non-relational databases.
Also Read: The Future of Software Development: Anticipating Risks in AI Integration
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Data and Business Analytics Skills
However, BI developers do not require the experience of data scientists, but the experience can give them a competitive edge. Without in-depth knowledge of data modeling and warehouse design, it can be challenging for developers to understand the need for BI systems.
In the initial stages of the BI tools development, the analysis will help to set exact needs for future applications and make strategic decisions to achieve the business goals.
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Debugging or Troubleshooting
Every stage of application design, development, deployment, and maintenance requires BI developers to have strong troubleshooting skills. A BI developer needs to find bugs in the code and fix issues related to queries and data representation.
