3. Make BI Great Again

Data Chatter

“Business intelligence” has become a rather unfashionable term in the world of data and analytics. From generating buisness insights from intelligent use of data, it has largely devolved to become a software engineering function - to connect databases to front end tools.

However, there is far more to business intelligence than just writing queries. In this episode, Karthik talks to another BI professional - Balaji Kuppuswamy, director of BI products at Youtube. They talk about what BI really is, the skills involved in BI, where it sits in an organisation, and how it can truly add value.

Show Notes:

00:03:30 - What is the definition of Business Intelligence?

00:07:20 - BI’s marketing and branding problem

00:12:50 - The role of science in BI

00:15:20 - Interactive dashboards

00:19:00 - What’s it like being a data scientist in BI?

00:27:30 - How Balaji got into BI

00:32:00 - Using BI tools

00:36:00 - Integrating intelligence into BI tools

00:39:00 - Building up a BI team.

00:48:00 - Agile in BI

Links:

Kaiser Fung’s article on BI and data science

Avinash Kaushik on “datapukes"

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".
The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.
You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog