The role of the business intelligence analyst and Datamodeling

Dear Readers,

What is the role of a business intelligence analyst?

Many of you will say, he/she is responsible for making sure the solution meets the user expectations, but isn't the role of the entire Business Intelligence team?

Ok, so let's say that the Business Analysts is then responsible for documenting the business requirements. If the role is only documentation, why do we need a business analyst, developers can do documentation right?

But you will say, developers might not understand the domain and we need someone who
understands the domain to accurately document the business requirements.

But if the previous statement is true, that means the users can document the requirements better than anyone, after all they are the experts of the domain.

Before we give up, let us explore something else. What if the business analyst could also do data modeling, so we have established that a good business analysts needs to have good domain knowledge, needs to know a little of development and needs to be very good with documentation. These are all qualities that define a good a data modeler.

You might be asking yourselves, Data modeler ha? The two roles cannot be more different, in one you deal with report and dashboard mock-ups and in the other one there are some abstract objects called entities that contain attributes. However, aren't all elements in a report attributes? Also, isn't a dashboard just a nice graphical representation of a report? So, following this logic, isn't the data modeler part of the business requirements?

And so, my dear readers isn't this the role of a business intelligence analyst, help business users articulate and document the requirements?

Until next time,

Noe