Whats a reporting job in Business intelligence like ?

Question

I'm a software programmer who works on java, php.

However, yesterday i got an offer from a company in Business Intelligence. The HR said the job would be in the "implementation" part. Can someone please clarify if this means reporting ?

Is a reporting job challenging for a programmer ? I mean, can someone please tell me what all this would include ?

Answer 1

Very cahllenging. Trying not to fall asleep is always challenging.

Technically not exactly high end - you may get very nice insight into how businesses run, though. LOTS of data work. Depending what you do - loading, scrubbing, anylysing, reporting. And sometimes you talk "loading" like LOADING - hundreds of gigabytes ;)

Answer 2

I think it has to do with reporting business intelligence, by that I think it means you will report if there is intelligence in the business of the job(but if there is no intelligence at all it is bad and you go home). HTH ! :)

Answer 3

As always, it depends on the company. Generally you'll be writing software to gather, analyse, and organise data in such a way that it can be presented to a decision maker to aid them in their decision making. Reporting is part of it, but not all of it.

From a purely coding point-of-view, BI isn't usually terribly challenging. You'll mostly be working with established data-mining or visualisation APIs, or applying well-known analysis techniques.

The "good" challenging aspects of the job come from engaging users and understanding busniess processes enough to deliver quality software first time.

The "bad" challenging aspects of the job come from the common situation where you're hit with the quadruple-whammy of demanding users, jobsworth analysts, visionless project managers, and haughty DBAs. That applies in any enterprise software development, though, and I'm sure all the users, analysts, pms, and dbas out there would all love to have a wee rant about all of us navel-gazing software engineers.

If you're prepared to do the legwork, develop a good relationship with your users, and really understand what it is they need, the job can be very satisfying.