Business Intelligence Roles

The most important resource of a data warehouse project is the team member. There are multiple roles for a successful BI/Data Warehouse project.

Team members will come from across the organization including the business areas and the information technology group. Most of the roles are temporary in nature and revolve around the project. Not all of the team members will be involved daily.

The business sponsor is the primary driver of the project. They are fiscally and financially responsible for the project. They are the project owner. This person if often a ranking business leader. They are the cheerleader and often don't play an active role in the project other than to keep it on track and play the enforcer when needed.

The IT organization leader of the project works closely with the project sponsor to ensure the success of the entire data warehouse / business intelligence project. This person is the primary person responsible for the initiative and the environment. They act as the go-between for the business and the technology team members.

They are responsible for staffing the technology team, as well as, developing and selling the business case to the business users. They play a heavy strategic role in the overall data program.

The project manager is responsible for the detailed project plan and keeping the project moving forward. They are responsible for identifying, resolving and escalating issues. It is also part of the role to manage the overall team.

The business project lead is a member of the business community who is savvy in information technology. They act as the liaison between the business team members and the information technology team members.

The business analyst role is responsible for generating the business requirements necessary to meet the objective of the project.

This analyst is charged with getting business agreement on terms and ensuring the definitions and rules are enforced.

The data modeler is responsible for the overall architecture of the system. They are responsible for developing the data models and dimensional aspects of the data warehouse. This role is often filled by a DBA with a mind set to business reporting models rather than transactional system data access.

The metadata manager is the gatekeeper for all metadata surrounding the data warehouse project. They ensure that each of the contributing areas, do in fact contribute. They set the standard for how the metadata is input to the storage area and police its accuracy.

The Extract, Transform, and Load end to end architecture is the responsibility of this role. In some projects there will be many developers who need to coordinate the efforts of making the data available to the application developer and the business users.

The application developer will generate business information from the data that is loaded into the data warehouse. The develop the framework from which business intelligence can be gathered. They need a deep understanding of the business and the data. They utilize business intelligence applications such as OLAP and other query reporting tools

Additionally, the team may include a technical support person, a security manager, a tester, a statistical specialist, an educator, and outside consultants with particular skills needed on a short term basis.

It takes many roles to have a successful data warehouse project. Sometimes these multiple skills can be found in one team member, sometimes multiple team members will be needed to fulfill one role, and most often the skills will have to be gained by one or more members of the team.

Copyright Eva Jane Secrist. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.