Gathering requirements for BI and analytics systems is more difficult than for operational systems. Without the specifics of business transactions, scheduled reports, and prescribed business rules, it is difficult to know where to start and how to proceed. The skill set for the BI requirements analyst includes techniques to identify requirements, tools to manage requirements, and checklists to ensure completeness.

Requirements processes vary widely for BI and analytics projects. Waterfall, iterative, agile, and DevOps projects each approach requirements differently. More established BI objectives such as dashboards, scorecards, and OLAP have tangible business requirements, while those for advanced analytics applications can be vague and elusive. A skilled requirements analyst must embrace a range of requirements processes from elicitation to discovery.

Information dashboards are an essential modern method for delivering information and intelligence. Dashboards range from local and individual dashboards developed using self-service BI tools to enterprise dashboards engineered, implemented, and supported by BI and IT organizations. Whether you are developing dashboards for local use or for enterprise performance management, careful dashboard design is critical for delivering valuable insight and preventing damaging misinformation. Dashboard developers need to understand measurement concepts, data visualization principles, user interface design, and much more.

Data visualization has rapidly become a critical part of business analytics and business communications. Without visualization, the numbers and statistics of analytics are difficult to interpret and incomprehensible to many who need to turn data into knowledge. The advent of big data, with the increasing volume and velocity of data, requires visualization as a technique to compress large volumes of data into digestible presentations and to observe streaming data in motion.

Elegant and well-designed data visualizations often appear to be easy because skilled visual developers are able to hide the complexities and the hard work behind the scenes. Business intelligence and business analytics professionals need to communicate as effectively in visual forms as they do with their verbal and written communication skills. Get started by learning the fundamentals of data visualization.