Careers

The Business Analyst (BA) is the primary contact with the business users. The BA meets with users to understand their needs with the aim of casting those needs as project requirements. The BA then translates the requirements into the technical terminology that will be needed by the development team.

A Business Analyst needs to be capable of serving as liaison between the business and the technical resources. For example, as technical issues arise, the BA can assist in helping the business users to understand the issues so effective remediation decisions can be made. As a consequence, the BA must have excellent written and interpersonal communication skills.

A key technical team player is the Data Analyst. Working from the requirements developed by the Business Analyst, the Data Analyst acts as a detective in discovering the specific source data that underpins the requirements. It is often helpful for the Data Analyst to participate in the requirements gathering process to uncover data issues early in the project. Frequently , business users are not knowledgeable about how their most critical data is actually represented in the source system. The Data Analyst finds the data and documents how various data elements relate to one another. In cases where there is ambiguity or data quality issues, the Data Analyst consults with the BA and business users to resolve the issues.

The Data Architect combines the project requirements and source data documentation to design an architecture that is the blueprint for developing the final product. This role needs to possess strong dimensional data modeling skills. It is not unusual for the Data Analyst and Data Architect roles to be handled by the same individual on small to medium-sized projects. Also, it helpful for the Data Architect to stay abreast of the requirements process to begin developing a sketch of the data architecture prior to finalization of requirements.

The ETL Developer designs and deploys the process by which source data is extracted, transformed, and then loaded to the target data warehouse. Since the majority of project risk and effort is involved with this step, it is crucial that the previous development phases are carried out with a high degree of quality. It is essential for the ETL Developer to have a strong understanding of the source data, the needed transformations, and star schema design from the very beginning of ETL development.

Business Intelligence projects at OnApproach are managed according the principles and standards that are in close alignment with those set forth the Project Management Institute. BI projects are highly iterative due to enterprise data issues. Data problems need to be identified and resolved in an iterative manner until all issues are resolved. Project plans therefore take these iterations into consideration when planning the sequence and duration of project tasks.

The “business end” of Business Intelligence is the reporting interface. Whether it is a large-scale application like Business Objects or a simple Excel pivot table, OnApproach designs, configures, and authors queries and reports to produce the expected analytical power specified in the project design.