‘Who does what’ in Analytics?

Business intelligence (BI) teams include roles that sound similar at first, but each comes with its own distinct responsibilities and skillsets. By understanding each of these positions, you can build a BI team that delivers the solutions and capabilities to help your organization get the most out of big data.

BI Developer

The BI Developer is the coder for the team. Their job is to create BI solutions for in-house, self-service analytics. They also serve as a data integrator. The typical technology this person must know includes extract, transform, load (ETL), SQL, online analytical processing, data warehousing, and data modeling.

This role is more technical in nature than some of the others, so it’s essential for BI developers to have a background in the technologies they need to create your organization’s BI solutions. They also need strong communication skills so they can explain technical concepts to the business users relying on BI for decision-making. The average salary for this position is $95,993, according to Salary.com.*

Data Analyst

Data analysts are the data summarizers of the team. They provide data mining, data manipulation, and data cleansing for the BI system. They may also play a part in the programming process. They prepare the data for analysis and surface insights for business analysts, leadership, and other stakeholders. Typically, they communicate this information through reports and other data visualizations intended for business users. 

The data analyst needs a strong understanding of statistics, machine learning, data management, and other technical skills required to get the data ready for use. They also need to know which types of data are useful for the organization and how to query it on databases. The average salary for this role is $77,781, per Salary.com.* While this position requires a level of technical aptitude, it includes both junior- and senior-level positions. 

Business Analyst

Business analysts act as a technological bridge between IT and internal stakeholders. They analyze systems and use reports from data analysts to guide data-driven decision-making. The skills that benefit business analysts include knowing how to use reporting tools, working with databases, data manipulation, business knowledge, and analytics. The decisions that leadership makes based on the business analyst’s insights include identifying areas of inefficiency, offering recommendations on changes, and improving business processes. 

This role is less technical than others on the analytics team and requires a business background. However, business analysts must know how to use BI solutions to create reports and examine the data. It’s often an entry-level position and offers an average salary of $77,781, according to Salary.com.* 

Database Administrator

The database administrator is the database handyperson on the team. They make sure there is proper and regular maintenance performed on the software used to manage the database. Their responsibilities include working with the relational database management system, monitoring database performance running system benchmarks, backing up BI data, and executing disaster recovery.

They keep the underlying technology running smoothly so the rest of the analytics team can focus on creating BI solutions, analyzing data, and making strategic decisions. They may have a strong focus on a particular database technology or a more generalized knowledge of the solutions. More specialized database administrators may take a senior role on the team. 

Database administrators have a highly technical role, with an average salary of $94,499, Salary.com reports.* 

Data Engineer

Data engineers are the data plumbers, managing the flow of big data from sources to systems. They work with the data before any of the analysts to ensure that it comes from the right sources, is in the proper format, and ends up in a data warehouse or data lake for use by the BI solution. Their skillset includes Hadoop, SQL, NoSQL, ETL, and other data pipeline and big data technologies. They may also need to set permissions for data set access to ensure that only authorized users work with this information. 

Data engineers have a highly technical role and enjoy an average salary of $108,110, according to Salary.com.*

Data Scientist

Data scientists are the data wizards. They transfigure big data from many sources into actionable insights. While they have some overlap with data analysts on the BI team, they use a system-based approach rather than surfacing specific insights. They create and train machine-learning models based on the data sets to create predictions with an automated, scalable solution. 

Data scientists have skill sets that include programming, statistics, Hadoop, machine learning, data mining, and big data infrastructure. Their average salary is $132,273, says Salary.com.* 

BI Director

BI directors are the captains of the BI team. They lead BI strategies, set analytics goals, and manage team members. This is a senior-level, leadership position that requires management skills, organizational leadership, and an understanding of BI technologies and trends. The average salary for this role is $173,319, states Salary.com.*

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*All salaries included in this article are current as of April 27, 2021.