Case Study of Discourse Community: Business Technology Analyst

I am interested in both business and technology but is there any job that combines both business and technology? The answer is yes. Although there are not a lot of these kinds of jobs. The one that I know is business technology analyst, which is the one that I wanted to do as my future career. An analyst is an individual who performs an analysis of a topic. The term may refer to one of the following professions: accounting, business, and finance. So, the business technology analyst is an emerging trans-disciplinary research area and professional in business administration. Since I want to become a successful Business Technology Analyst, I must make myself into this discourse community. I will need to do some research in this discourse community, to know what this job is doing and what kind of skills do I need to become an analyst, also introduce a system which is often used by business analysts. This would help us understand more about the business technology analyst’s world.

After doing some research, I now know what skills an analyst needs. A business analyst scrutinizes sets of data looking for ways to increase efficiency in an organization. In this way, the business analyst often acts as a liaison between different departments in a company, finding ways to streamline processes throughout the organization. The business analyst must be able to communicate well with these different groups in the organization, sometimes acting as a diplomat, and presenting solutions in ways that colleagues and stakeholders will understand. In this process, becoming a successful analyst, we need to have some essential skills, such as documentation skills, analytical skills. I found a blog explaining documentation skills and a article about analytical skill.

Starting from the documentation skills. I have found an article titled: How to Get Your Team Excited About Documentation (Again), this article is written by Adrienne Bellehumeur, this article is an excerpt from one of her books: Supercharge Your Documentation. In this article, she talks about what is documentation, and why or how to do documentation. In one paragraph I found she talks about why we should do documentation, if we did not do documentation, we will be frustrated on finding the documents. Here is a paragraph of Ms. Bellehumeur explaining why should we have a good documentation skills:

Managers often assume that their employees or consultants know how to create effective documents. These assumptions are, unfortunately, not the case: many managers are left disappointed and frustrated on finding out that the documentation created by their former consultants or employees is incomplete or unreadable and must be recreated. Rather, documentation is a dynamic skill – being a great documenter takes an understanding of these skills and many years of practice. But the skills are worth it in the end – the ability to document brings a valuable, tangible skill that you can leverage in all organizations, all industries and all projects and all operations (Bellehumeur pg. 5).

Having a strong documentation skill will really help an analyst to get started. A business analyst is responsible for documenting functional requirements, wireframes, business cases and more. Also, because the analyst always carries tons of data. They must prioritize tasks and be efficient with time and resource allocation. Having a good documentation skill means they can carry important information to the right people. That is very important, we do not want to give the wrong document to the wrong person, that may cause the organizations to have a big problem. So, creating a clear, concise documentation is a very important job for an analyst.

Going to the second analysts’ must learn skill ‘analytical skills’. Having an analytical skill is obviously a skill that an analyst has to have. I found an article in Businessphrases.net, titled: Analytical Skills. The Businessphrases.net is a website that provides us all the business skills and software knowledge we truly need. Strong analytical skills and analytical thinking are among the most required business abilities Widely used in resumes and cover letters. But what exactly are analytical skills and how can we improve them?

Analytical skills are the ability to collect, gather, visualize and analyze information in detail. They include also the ability to see a problem or situation from different points of view. Analytical skills allow you to solve complex problems by making decisions in the most effective way. That is way analytical thinking became one of the crucial skills in the workplace with a vital role in every type of business field. For example: If you are a business management developer your main goals are to find business opportunities for market growth and to increase sales. To achieve that you have to be able to gather and analyze information about company’s current position and to build a plan and strategies for business developing. If you do not possess strong analytical skills, it would be a mission impossible (“Analytical Skills”).

Save your time!
We can take care of your essay

• Proper editing and formatting
• Free revision, title page, and bibliography
• Flexible prices and money-back guarantee

Place Order

And the article does provide us some useful tips for us to improve our analytical skills. Below are the tips of how to collect the right information for your work:

• Determine exactly what you want to know.
• List down all possible sources of information.
• Determine which are the best sources of information and which are just useful.
• Determine the methods and ways of collecting information. For example, if you are in the marketing area, online survey tools are a great way to collect information.
• Determine gaps in your knowledge and try to fill these gaps.

(“Analytical Skills”)

A business analyst really needs to spend a lot of time analyzing all the problems, looking at hundreds or thousands of documents and determining solutions. By understanding how to interpret business, software and information workflows will help you advance in your career.

After understanding some skills that the analysts need, I would like to introduce an analytical system which is often used by the people in the analysts’ field, ‘OLAP’ (Online analytical processing). I found a company named Sisense, on their website they explained what exactly is OLAP. Sisense is a business analytical company that help their users simplifies every step of the business intelligence process, from data preparation to delivery of insights. So, what is OLAP? Here is the OLAP explained by Sisense:

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) was introduced into the business intelligence (BI) space over 20 years ago, in a time where computer hardware and software technology weren't nearly as powerful as they are today. Back then, given the circumstances, OLAP was groundbreaking. It introduced a spectacular way for business users (typically analysts) to easily perform multidimensional analysis of large volumes of business data. In analytics, it is often required to aggregate, group and join data.

These operations represent the most difficult types of queries for a relational database to process. Therefore, the magic behind OLAP derives from its ability to pre-calculate and pre-aggregate data (“Sicense”).

The OLPA systems have been categorized into three different taxonomy, MOLAP, ROLAP, and HOLAP, each operates together to help create a big database for the business. Thanks to the OLAP system, for the help of this system, analysts are able to have an easier way to analyze big volumes of information and not to mess up all the important information.

I know I still have a long way to go, to become a successful business technology analyst. I am just starting to learn everything related to this career, learning all the skills I need, and also learn the OLAP systems and lots of new things waiting for me to dig in. I enjoy learning new things in my discourse community. I wanted to become a successful analyst to be able to help people to grow their business or either help myself to grow my own business. I hope this long way will lead me to success and hope it will be worth it to keep staying in this discourse community.