Learn how to build a business intelligence (BI) team that can deliver value and insights to your organization. Find out how to assess your needs, define your roles, hire your talent, and organize your team.

This part should have some more reasoning behind the rationale for different organisations. e.g.: Having a central BI team will keep their competency grouped and help them support each other, while having the analysts assigned to different departments will keep them close to business stakeholdders

Last updated on Aug 2, 2024

How do you build a BI team with the right skills and roles?

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming data into insights that can help businesses make better decisions. But to do BI effectively, you need a team of people with different skills and roles, who can work together to deliver value to your organization. How do you build a BI team with the right skills and roles? Here are some tips to help you get started.

1 Assess your needs

The first step to building a BI team is to assess your current and future needs for data and analytics. What are the goals and challenges of your business? What kind of data do you have and what do you want to do with it? How do you measure your performance and impact? These questions will help you define the scope and purpose of your BI team, and the skills and roles you need to fill.

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Ashmi B

Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst | I help organizations make sound business decisions based on the data
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In one of my past companies, we were on a mission to amp up the small business loan sales for a major bank. Before assembling our BI team, we sat down with their SMEs, understood their needs and goals, and then started building the team. After a bit of digging, we discovered they were juggling work across a bunch of Excel files. Thus, our solution was simple. We brought in an ETL developer to work on transforming and loading data into an SQL warehouse. Meanwhile, our Power BI analyst got to work crafting reports based on the current info. Basically, we took the help from the team to understand requirements and objectives before developing the team.

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Richard Mwangi

Data Engineer
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And keep in mind that the info you need to answer these questions may be time consuming to acquire so listening to different consultants opinions could save you some time.

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2 Define your roles

The next step is to define the roles and responsibilities of your BI team members. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, you may need more or less roles, but here are some common ones to consider: A BI manager, who leads the team and oversees the strategy, budget, and execution of BI projects; a BI analyst, who analyzes the data and generates reports, dashboards, and insights; a BI developer, who designs, builds, and maintains the data pipelines, databases, and BI tools; a BI architect, who defines the data architecture, standards, and governance; and a BI consultant, who provides expert advice and guidance on BI best practices, trends, and solutions. All of these roles are essential for ensuring the quality, security, and scalability of the data and systems, as well as helping to identify and solve business problems with data.

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Richard Mwangi

Data Engineer
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If you can't afford a full time consultant, it'll be worth investing in tech audit to asssess quality of your BI against industry norms. A Best in class BI setup will attract better talent.

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3 Hire your talent

Once you have defined your roles, you need to hire the right people for your BI team. This can be challenging, as BI skills are in high demand and short supply. You may need to look for candidates with a combination of technical, analytical, and business skills, as well as soft skills like communication, collaboration, and problem-solving. You may also need to provide training and development opportunities for your existing staff, or outsource some of your BI tasks to external partners or vendors.

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Peter Clark

Head of Business Intelligence Platforms at S&P Global Market Intelligence (Power BI SME & advocate)
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The important things are to have clearly defined standards and expected outcomes and to then frame your recruitment and development around them

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Dr. Christian Scheeren

at Scheeren Consulting GmbH offering BI, BPO, Supply Chain Management and International Project Management
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This by far the most challenging part, at least in my region Europe. What you ideally want to find in the person: - knowledge expansion: always curious about tech topics, tenacious to solve hard problems - consultant attitude: loves to explain technical stuff to people in the company in an understandable fashion, not showing-off their know-how, but trying to help people - business-passionate: loves to understand how BI can be a value added to the specific business - self-managed: conceptualizes an area and comes back with results to be discussed. No need to micro-manage them. The people you can get will reverse-engineer the goals you can achieve

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4 Organize your team

The final step is to organize your team and assign them to specific projects and tasks. Depending on your organization's culture, size, and goals, there are different ways to structure your BI team. A centralized model has the BI team as a separate unit that serves the entire organization, reporting to a senior executive or a dedicated BI director. Alternatively, a decentralized model splits the BI team into smaller teams embedded in different business units or functions, reporting to their respective managers or leaders. A hybrid model is a mix of centralized and decentralized, with some core members providing common services and standards, and some specialized members supporting specific business needs and users. Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for building a BI team, but by following these steps, you can create a team that can deliver value and insights to your organization.

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Tallak Bergheim

Senior Manager - Data & Analytics at BearingPoint | Head of Insight
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This part should have some more reasoning behind the rationale for different organisations. e.g.: Having a central BI team will keep their competency grouped and help them support each other, while having the analysts assigned to different departments will keep them close to business stakeholdders

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How do you build a BI team with the right skills and roles?

1

2

3

4

1 Assess your needs

2 Define your roles

3 Hire your talent

4 Organize your team

Business Intelligence

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How do you build a BI team with the right skills and roles?

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1 Assess your needs

2 Define your roles

3 Hire your talent

4 Organize your team

Business Intelligence

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