What is a business intelligence consultant?
A business intelligence consultant is someone who sets up computer systems to help decision-making. To understand what such a system represents, an interesting approach is to rely on examples from our daily lives. In our everyday life, we all make many decisions:
- How will I dress to go out? A glance at the weather is enough to decide;
- What time do I have to leave work to pick up my children at school? A simple calculation will answer the question. But the answer may be a little more complicated to get if I have to take into account the state of the road traffic (it's Friday, I must not forget that there will be traffic jams if I do not want to be late) or if I go to school by public transport when I am used to using my car;
- Which movie will I go to see at the cinema? If I strongly hesitate between several films, I will probably go to a specialized site to consult the summaries, see the ratings, read the reviews filed, or even view the trailers.
Fortunately, the decisions that flow from these questions are often easy to make!
More rarely, we are faced with decisions that are more difficult to make, which often represent greater challenges and raise many questions. You want to buy an apartment or a house? This is a very nice project that will require asking a lot of questions. These will concern, in bulk:
- The price of the good;
- the place of residence;
- The number of pieces ;
- The living space;
- Local shops;
- Schools;
- Methods of transportation ;
- transportation times to get to work;
- The reputation of the corner;
- cultural dynamics;
- The animation;
- Green spaces ;
- local taxes;
- Family proximity ...
This list is long and certainly incomplete!
If it's easy to pick one or two possibilities, it will be difficult to make useful comparisons and to notice certain things without writing these elements on paper. To facilitate the reflection, the ideal will even be to gather all the information in a single table, using for example a software like Excel:
With this table, future buyers will be able to make their decision more easily because they will be able to compare all the data at a glance.
In this example, future buyers will fill out this table themselves, using their different sources of information: websites, discussions with neighbors, notes taken during a discussion with a real estate agent, flyers, etc. In a company, you also use sorts of tables to store data. In fact, they are more complex computer systems than simple tables called databases.
We come to the skills that the business intelligence consultant must have. The latter is primarily a database specialist. Secondly, it is able to set up systems that automatically fill databases. As in our example, in a company, the data to be recovered comes from different sources: databases, computer files (which may look like our example, with much more data), the Internet, and so on.
Another important difference between our small example and the decision support systems used by companies is the volume of data. The systems of the latter do not store a few tens of data but millions or even billions of data. For example, banks and telephone operators are known for their huge databases knowing that they collect data from millions of consumers daily!
Thus, databases are absolutely essential for any medium or large company because they can store a very large amount of data. Another objective of the decision-making consultant is to use this data to build tables that will make statistics. These statistics concern all of the company's businesses:
- How many employees does the company have? What is the salary of employees? When did they arrive? Why were they absent?
- How many products does the company have in stock? Who are these products bought from? When and how are the products delivered?
- How many products has the company sold this year? How does this figure change compared to previous years? In which region did the products sell best? At what time of the year?
- Who are the customers of the company? How much are customers buying? What do they buy?
- What turnover did the company achieve this year? What margin did she make?
These examples represent only a sample of the very large number of questions that business managers must answer in order to carry out their work. The statistics are here contained in tables that may look like the one in our example (see image above) but these data can be in other forms. For example, the data that represents the turnover made by the company in the different French regions can be placed on a map of France instead of using a simple table. In fact, more generally, one of the objectives of the business intelligence consultant is to think about how the data should be represented, in collaboration with the company's managers.
Finally, we achieve the essential goal of business intelligence. Based on an analysis of statistical data, company managers aim to make decisions that will improve business performance. For example, if the results of a new store opened in Aix-en-Provence far exceed the objectives that had been hoped for, managers can decide to open a second store in the same city or in the area. Another example is a restaurant chain that offers a new dessert to customers in its 500 restaurants. This is a special ice cream that will only be offered during the summer. If the sales figures are excellent,
Statistics are essential, but the numbers themselves do not tell the whole story. A more general reflection must always be made before making a decision. In our previous example, let's imagine that ice cream sales are only average. What is the cause of this result? The proposed dessert would not please consumers so much? It's possible. But the truth can also be elsewhere: bad weather conditions (potential consumers are less out), a rather cold summer that encourages more to eat hot products, or even the crisis that limits the expenses of the outings.
Summary
In summary, here's what we can learn from the business of business intelligence consultant:
- The business intelligence consultant is a specialist in databases;
- He is able to automatically fill these bases thanks to computer techniques that he masters;
- He knows how to build tables that allow statistics to be made;
- He can also present these statistics in other forms than a simple table;
- It helps business managers to make the best technical choices;
- He is able to work with a very large number of people in the company.
This was not mentioned in the article but the decision-making computer consultant is also an intellectually curious person, able to write quality documents, to make oral presentations of quality, and to adapt to his environment of job.
Source:
Business Intelligence Consultant
