If you are considering a career as a business intelligence architect, you have made an excellent option. BI architects are some of the leading minds in business and information management.
They utilize data components and information management systems to organize data and apply technology that presents data as usable information.
To understand their roles, we will look at the role of a BI architect, educational requirements, and career outlook. Scroll down to see more!
Job Description
What Is A Business Intelligence Architect?
A business information architect will help design business and management architecture, which is one of the ways to organize information and data to deliver insights into productivity, efficiency, and business systems.
As a BI architect, your typical duties are to design a system that is the data collected by other BI analysts. Then, executives and managers will utilize your framework to determine new strategies or solutions for conducting business.
Qualifications for a Business Intelligence architect career include a bachelor’s degree in statistics, data science, or computer science experience in business analytics and strong analytical skills.
Responsibilities and Duties
- Developing scalable and maintaining BI applications to meet business objectives.
- Providing expert guidance on Business Intelligence skills and technologies.
- Maintaining accurate and complete technical architectural documents.
- Developing security and authentication standards for the organization.
- Defining Business Intelligence standards, guidelines, and best practices for technical teams and business groups.
- Supporting BI tools upgrades in development, testing, and documentation.
- Performing maintenance and handling activities for BI tools.
- Diagnosing and resolving BI tool capacity issues.
- Recommending strategies to improve the capacity and performance of BI tools.
- Addressing customer issues and queries promptly.
- Providing BI technical and administrative support during weekends, after-hours, and holidays when needed.
- Providing technical training on BI tools to the junior staff.
- Working with technical and business groups to develop and maintain a data warehouse platform for BI reporting.
- Collaborating with BI Administrators, Analysts, and developers to successfully develop BI reporting and analysis solutions.
Education Requirements
Becoming a business intelligence architect may require a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field. But some employers may prefer their candidates to have a master’s degree.
In addition, candidates may need a few years of practical work and experience. So it is best to look for internships in your industry of interest. Thanks to that, you can tune your technical and business skills as a BI Architect.
Essential Skills
Here are some critical skills for BI architects:
Software Proficiency
As a Business Intelligence architect, proficiency and experience in programs and applications for data management are crucial.
BI software tools like Looker, SiSense, and SAP BI are typical for business intelligence processes. Having proficiency in such BI software tools is beneficial for your career.
Data Warehousing
The ability to source, aggregate, clean, and secure important business information within the organizational data warehouse is essential to a business intelligence architect’s job.
In addition, monitoring process performance and providing information security are essential to your career.
Database Architecture
The BI architect has extensive knowledge of database architecture, including developing and designing enterprise data systems to manage large amounts of business information.
Also, those technical skills encompass proficiency in many frameworks to construct database designs.
Programming
This skill is also necessary for Business Intelligence architecture. For example, most BI architects develop expertise in SQL (Structured Query Language), PHP, and Python, since many enterprises use these programming and scripting languages for database systems.
Business Acumen
The knowledge of business processes, financial management, departmental organization, and strategic planning, is critical to work as a BI architect.
Business acumen skill is also helpful for overseeing BI development projects. Also, they can support effective communication with executives who utilize Business Intelligence data to establish and achieve objectives.
Mathematics and Statistics
Business intelligence relies on statistical analysis and mathematics for many processes. The ability to compute numerical data, utilize statistical formulas and handle Clogical issues inside data systems is essential to career success.
Communication Skills
Technical writing, data documentation, and reporting are some aspects of the communication skills you may use as a BI architect.
The ability to learn from many perspectives, seek and apply feedback and collaborate with stakeholders are communication skills that you need to master.
Leadership Skills
The BI architect also develops the leadership skill as they work with and supervise business teams across departments.
Policy deployment, software training, and employee development are also duties and responsibilities that depend on your leadership success.
Essential Tools
These five essential BI tools can help you discover insights to make important business decisions:
Job Outlook
As a business intelligence architect, you can expect to work as an independent consultant or employee. There are always many opportunities available to match your work style.
According to the BLS, job growth from 2020 to 2030 will be 9% for the category of computer occupations, including business intelligence analysts. This growth rate is faster than average compared to all other professions.
Salary
The average salary pay for a Business Intelligence Architect in the US is $147,799 per year. A simple calculation equates to $71.06 per hour, $2,842 per week, and $12,316 per month.
Most BI Architect salaries range from $127,000 to $163,500, with top earners getting $183,000 annually across the US.
The average salary range for a BI Architect significantly varies, showing there may be many chances for increased pay and advancement based on many factors, including location, skill level, and years of experience.
Advantages and Disadvantages
- Good salary.
- You can work in a variety of industries.
- You get to learn a lot about the business vertical you will be working in.
- You do not need to know many languages.
- This work is not as epochal as building technology products or web-based applications.
- You won’t learn much about the web, where everything is happening.
FAQs
How Can Business Intelligence (BI) Architects Increase Their Salary?
As a Business Intelligence architect, you can increase your salary in some ways.
- Change employer: You can consider moving to new employers that are willing to pay higher for your skill set.
- Level of Education: Getting advanced degrees may allow you to increase your income.
- Managing Experience: If you oversee more junior Business Intelligence Architects, this experience may raise the likelihood of earning more.
How To Become a Business Intelligence Architect?
If you are interested in becoming a BI architect, one of the first factors to consider is how much education you need.
We have determined that about 70% of BI architects have a bachelor’s degree.
Regarding higher education levels, we have found that around 25% of BI architects have master’s degrees. Although most BI architects hold college degrees, owning only a GED or high school degree is essential.
What Are Examples of Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence encompasses many activities associated with gathering and analyzing data. The following are common processes of Business Intelligence that help organizations optimize their performance.
- Data Preparation: Consolidating disparate data sources and defining measurements to prepare them for analysis.
- Data Visualization: It translates data analysis into a visual format, such as a graph or chart, to make information simple and understandable.
- Statistical Analysis: Using the conclusions from descriptive analyses and statistics to understand the reason behind trend(s).
- Descriptive Analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to determine what happened within the business.
- Reporting: Sharing data analyzes with the decision-makers and stakeholders to make informed strategies.
- Benchmarking and Performance Metric Analysis: Comparing data regarding current performance and processes to historical metrics to track progress towards goals.
- Querying: Requesting specific data or information from a database.
- Data Mining: Using machine learning, databases, and statistics to identify relationships and trends in datasets.
What Are the Benefits of Business Intelligence?
- It facilitates a better and more efficient decision-making process.
- It provides information for better customer relationship management.
- It is a more accurate, faster process of reporting critical information.
- It provides a facility for assessing companies’ readiness to meet new business challenges.
- It will support the usage of best practices and identify every hidden cost.
- It improves the profitability of the company.
What Are Similar Occupations to BI Engineers?
The most similar professions to BI engineering are:
- Data Analyst.
- BI Analyst.
- Data Scientist.
- Analytics Consultant.
Which Languages Are Useful for Business Intelligence?
If you have just entered the field of business intelligence, you must be aware of the SQL coding language of databases. BI experts write SQL queries to analyze and extract data from the existing database and develop visualizations.
BI experts also need to be well-versed in the two common statistical languages: R for statistical analysis, and Python for general programming.
Learning these programming languages is optional, but mastering them will benefit you when analyzing large datasets.
Does Business Intelligence Require Coding?
BI analysts should possess knowledge of coding in R, SQL, and Python in the data warehousing & modeling stages. If you know the working of those programming languages, you will find it easy to adhere to the roles of BI.
What Is Needed to Become a Business Intelligence Analyst?
Most people will start by getting a bachelor’s degree in data science, information systems, engineering, business administration, or a similar field.
Once you have a degree, you can pursue an entry-level job, like database administration, to start a career in business intelligence.
Is Business Intelligence a Good Career?
Yes, business intelligence is a good career. It is a growing field that delivers significant chances for professional growth and interesting work as it has significant potential for growth and high salaries.
Career Advice
Business Intelligence is the lifeblood of organizational decision-making. BI Architects use their skill and experience to manage data sources and transform them into trusted information for use in the analysis.
By pursuing this field, your future employment prospects are huge. You can expect to get a good position with an attractive salary.
So are you ready to shine? Thank you for reading!