Many people have this doubt about the Business Intelligence job offer: “Do I need to be an statistician/work in I.T./be an mathematician/be the chosen one to work with Business Intelligence?”
The answer for that is a big NO! Despite the Business Intelligence area being very technical, it is not restricted to the ones who hold a certain degree, HOWEVER, this is a field that do require a few technical and essential knowledge, that I will list below.
Some previous posts already brought up some of the relevant and necessary knowledge that every Business Intelligence analyst must have, but let’s make a basic list of what is gonna be asked for a Business Intelligence analyst in the gaming area, a zone in a booming moment, by the way!
Nothing more fair than we start with the most general information in the area, which I consider most important:
GOOD COMMUNICATION:
Yes, good communication is necessary in any job, but it is a vital matter in Business Intelligence, it must guide our life! And no… good communication doesn’t mean using complicated vocabulary, on the contrary! In our reports and dashboards we have to use an efficient language, good enough for the customer to understand what we want to express with the data which we collected and analysed.
CRITICAL THINKING:
Kinda obvious, right? Our careers exist to support the most different decision making acts, in many levels, so the critical thinking is essential to Business Intelligence professionals, since not only must we decide what data and information will be important to our reports, as we also must be able to analyse and processes them, in a way that make sense to that particular decision make.
ÉTHIC:
The raw data is not modifiable, but its numbers interpretation is. So FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING OF ALL THAT IS SACRED AND EVEN PROFANE, resist at every impulse to change the data to create a narrative that can be better received for your customer. Always work with reliable data and with what they really mean..
TEAMWORK:
The professional responsible for the Business Intelligence in gaming must have gook teamwork skills, since he/she must need the help of all his/her coleagues from other areas, as also this group will need a hand of the B.I. guy as well.
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But and to work in the Gaming Industry?
We’re just getting started and we already have all these abilities that compose a good Business Intelligence professional for the game industry. And yes, there is a lot, but now we have reached the tasteful part of this article. Let’s get into the specific skills of this area!
• DATA WAREHOUSE KNOWLEDGE: If you read our previous article about Business Intelligence here on Compass, you already are an expert in knowing what is a Data Lake and also know what is a Data Warehouse and yes, master these things is an essencial part of our day to day.
• BI TOOLS: If you have been following our posts about Business Intelligence here in Compass, certainly saw some B.I. tools around here, like Hadoop, for example. Being aware of these tools (Open Refine, Tableau, Power BI, and many others) is vital to making your analyses more refined and improving the results of your work, making the job itself a lot easier.
• OLAP: Nope, this note about Olaf and it certainly does not like warm hugs. OLAP stands for On-line Analytical Processing and it is a VERY helpful software in terms of processing, organizing and accessing all the data collected by Business Intelligence. Do you wanna know more about OLAP? Stay tune here on Compass, who knows if we can make an article just about that? Hehe
• CREATE DASHBOARDS AND REPORTS: Of course, while the biggest part of the Business Intelligence analyst is based on science, the part of creating Dashboards and Reports is their art. Well, not the kind of art you can sell on the beach after the COVID-19 pandemic goes away, but iis in this part that their creativity shines and the difficulty of balancing the data collected appears. To create good reports and dashboards, we must just not understand all the subjects that embody our study in that moment, but also we have to fully understand or client demands and expectations.
And that’s it! Here are some of the abilities that I would like to show which certainly will help you to have a jumpstart in the Business Intelligence career in the games industry.
As a constantly evolving area, this list is constantly changing as well. Clearly, a Business Intelligence analyst needs to have many more abilities than the aforementioned, since the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the way to start this career. Did you liked and wanna know more about the crazy BI world? So keep following our posts on Compass for more articles like this one!
And now, I’m leaving. See you next time, folks!
