How Business Intelligence is different from Data Science
By: Low Wei Hong
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Data Science, Programming

Working Journey: Business Intelligence

After working as a business intelligence for 10 months, here are some experiences I would like to share. If you are still an undergraduate, or just graduated, or still considering to switch your job career to business intelligence, I hope you will make use of this “past data” before making your final decision.

Before I started, just to provide some background of mine, I was working at Shopee as local business intelligence. Thus, I was responsible for providing reports only on the local market. Besides, my main responsible not only included crawling a large scale of websites to perform competitor analysis but also build machine learning models to help the company in saving operating costs.

From what you notice above, this position is all about business. Every day, I will receive multiple requests from other internal teams to perform certain analyses. I will need to communicate with them, giving them advice on how this kind of analysis should be performed so that it will not be simply wasted. To retrieve the data I need, I would need to write a lot of SQL queries.

Here are three points I would like to point out so far.

Do anticipate that your daily working life will be flooded with requests, whether it is a do-able or a not do-able request. Don’t be shocked that your working life will be filling with lots of ad-hoc requests.

Besides, there will be lots of communication required for this position. If you are a person who wants to focus only on the technical part of business intelligence, do ask the interviewer more detail about what you will be doing in day to day basis and also bombard them with technical questions. This will at least make sure you will be able to know the environment before accepting the job.

Other than that, proficient in SQL is a plus. No matter what requests are coming in, the only way to extract data internally is through SQL queries.

Back in my working life, reports occupied most of my time as business intelligence. They could come in different forms, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even ad-hoc basis. Therefore having skills like VBA or Python would be very beneficial, so that you will be able to automate them.

Sharing on more technical parts of this position composes of web crawling and build some machine learning models. These two components are also essential in an e-commerce business, one reason is to gain a competitive edge and the other one is to reduce the cost for the company.

For web crawling, from what I have experienced, the most difficult part is to maintain it. Building a web crawler is simple, but to make sure your web crawler will not be blocked by websites is a whole new different story. Besides, building machine learning models, it is just less than a small piece of the pie in my business intelligence working life.

This is the last point I want to make. Tech Skill required in this position is minimal, business is the most important aspect. Even though you are not good at tech, if you are interested in business, then this position is very suitable for you.