a career path in "business intelligence"

[ivan2]

from what the OP's going for i believe he's more on the analyst side than on the technical engineering side of BI. You will need to deal with users a lot to get everything they need so you can build a "universe" that they can query from. As many tools will give the end user freedom to construct queries from the fields available to them, I can see that analysts are moving towards a more technical role than just report writing.

And yes, if you can get in the door it is on high demand to the company that knows better.

 

[KingGheedora]

Also wanted to add some general thoughts on this:

I think BI is a good specialty/field to get into, it's an up and coming area right now, and doesn't require much education. Still not completely standardized, and lots of new tools and products being released. Like most areas in tech though, it will evolve so fast that you should not plan on being in BI more than 5-10 years from now. By then the stuff that is innovative today will either be commoditized or obsolete. Or, it will be so different that you'll have to re-educate. If you don't pick up new skills along the way you'll be relegated to "legacy systems" work.

If you are intellectually curious, or have an aptitude for statistics, AI, comp.sci, I would recommend also exploring data mining, machine learning, and analytics, etc, either at the same time, or once you've gotten a solid understanding of BI. BI is useful but the skills are easily found cheaper in offshore outsourced labor, and that will probably only get worse as time passes.

 

[Braznor]

Handling BI is a part of my daily job. BI makes it simple for an enterprise to collate data into meaningful presentations, even inspite of them being linked through remote locations.

Here is how BI works.

SAP R3/R4 -> DATA SETS -> BI.

BI is a component of SAP just like FICO or MM. In my organization, the entire information presentation side for a 500 Million dollar company is just eight people. Eight people can handle the informational needs of a company (measuring revenues in hundreds of millions of dollars across continents of business) using BI.

 

[JTsyo]

How boring, I thought it would be industrial espionage.

 

[Phokus]

Handling BI is a part of my daily job. BI makes it simple for an enterprise to collate data into meaningful presentations, even inspite of them being linked through remote locations.

Here is how BI works.

SAP R3/R4 -> DATA SETS -> BI.

BI is a component of SAP just like FICO or MM. In my organization, the entire information presentation side for a 500 Million dollar company is just eight people. Eight people can handle the informational needs of a company (measuring revenues in hundreds of millions of dollars across continents of business) using BI.

I don't see BI in my login options for SAP, can it be some other module?

The only SAP logon i have access to is PR1 [FINANCE]

 

[Phokus]

Also, BI just sounds like some fancy name for reporting which i was kind of interested in. But it also sounds like something you could outsource pretty easily though. Thoughts?

 

[Braznor]

I don't see BI in my login options for SAP, can it be some other module?

The only SAP logon i have access to is PR1 [FINANCE]

It's probably not installed. The SAP login for BI in my org is BI-Production. But the interface I mainly use is the presentation feature which gets added as part of Add-ins in Excel. But it would still need a connection to the SAP server, for it sources data from the daily preloaded R3 database.

 

[zinfamous]

Oxymoron if you ask me

 

[Phokus]

It's probably not installed. The SAP login for BI in my org is BI-Production. But the interface I mainly use is the presentation feature which gets added as part of Add-ins in Excel. But it would still need a connection to the SAP server, for it sources data from the daily preloaded R3 database.

Oh ok, that sort sounds like Business Warehouse, i have that installed in Excel as well.

 

[cw42]

A finance background mixed with this is very useful and desirable also.

 

[JS80]

I just switched jobs with a shitty BI "department." CFO and I are ramping it up. BI = CFO's best friend.

 

[cirrrocco]

I don't see BI in my login options for SAP, can it be some other module?

The only SAP logon i have access to is PR1 [FINANCE]

It depends on how your SAP login GUI pad is setup. Maybe users dont need access to BI systems. Check with your BASIS team. Also you need to have BI turned on, it is a separate bolt on to the standard R3 system

 

[cirrrocco]

The downside I can see of BI is again outsourcing. since a lot of the grunt work can be done in India, the billing rates of BI guys have been decreasing. Instead of having a guy making 100/hr doing BI reports, they can have someone making 20/hr create the report and mgmt just runs the bookmark and viola the report is displayed.

You have to consider that as well.

 

[rishis90]

hi
i am currently in finaly year engineering (electronics)
interested in Business intelligence to make a career with
so what all things, knowledge should i have to start with? any courses? and tools? to work with?