Business Intelligence, Financial Modelling and the Excel difference.
Within many companies, there are ften two distinct camps of business analyst, defined as anyone who organises data and creates meaningful information and analyses as part of their job. In one camp, you have spreadsheet users. These are usually professionals in finance, sales, human resources, operations, etc. They are likely to have a business
background and varying degrees of technical acumen. They favor spreadsheets because
they can create business models such as forecasts, budgets, strategic plans, compensation and other models that provide answers to a variety of straightforward, day-to-day issues. Some of these spreadsheet users have developed advanced skills for
building pivot tables, linked worksheets, and macros.
In the other camp, there are the business intelligence (BI) people, financial modelling skills. They are typically professionals with degrees in computer science, database administration or some other technical specialisation.
They’ve embraced BI tools due to their superior reporting, analytics, performance, integration and scalability. They develop complex multi-dimensional OLAP analyses whose capabilities can be extended and customised with programming. They create
detailed reports and dashboards by aggregating, organising and presenting historic company data. As these two camps come from differing perspectives, have differing objectives, and use different business tools, they effectively “speak different languages”
which results in a significant gap that hinders the full potential of business analytics within the organisation. For these people we recommend a free trial of the Business Intelligence financial modelling tool QUANTRIX. Free Trial QUANTRIX
Filling the Gap
Businesses need a tool that brings the two analyst camps together by filling the gap between spreadsheets and BI tools – one that affords the approachability of spreadsheets with the robust analysis and reporting capabilities of BI applications. In
his article “The Changing Face of Business Intelligence”, David Wells discusses the gap between IT-centric BI applications and office-oriented spreadsheets. As he states, “The goal of next generation analytics is not to choose – certainly not to eliminate one approach in favor of the other. Instead, it is to fill in the middle, moving from two extremes to a continium of analytic options.” He further contends that BI needs to be focused more on the business analyst.
"The business analyst" says Wells "is not someone with a business analyst title, but more likely a manager who simply has to perform analysis as part of day-to-day work. This new generation of analysts has high expectations. They want their analytics fast, they want easy connections to trustworthy data, and they want to keep the data in sight. But most of all they want forward-looking analytics. The retrospective stuff of the past doesn't meet their needs. They want to answer 'what if' questions with modeling and simulation." Thats why we recommend a
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