SAP Business Intelligence: From a dream to my profession

Everyone knows the term “dream job”. But everyone has a different definition of what it means. In a general context, you speak of harmonizing your daily working routine with your own talents and values. This leads to joy and fulfilment in your job. The joy of the activity during work is important and valuable because we spend a lot of our lifetime with and in our work. I combine my enjoyment of technical topics with my job in SAP Business Intelligence. 

 

Do you know what SAP Business Intelligence is? As an SAP Business Intelligence Consultant, I will show you in this blog post what is behind this concatenation of beautiful English terms and why it is my dream job. The future of the working world is digital. This statement is neither controversial nor a groundbreaking insight in 2022, in fact this statement is “old news”. Since the 1990s, the trend towards digital workplaces, complex information systems and the ever-increasing relevance of information systems in everyday business life has been discernible. Hardly any company that has exceeded a certain size is able to do without modern IT systems. As the size of a company increases, the number of IT systems required for everyday operations naturally increases as well.

 

The effects of this trend can be seen in the working world on many different levels – from the changing requirement profile of all employees to new professions that did not even exist 20 or 30 years ago. With the continuously increasing number of IT systems, the scope and volume of data collected has also increased to an almost unimaginable extent. Whereas at the beginning of the millennium new servers were delivered with a few hundred gigabytes or in some cases terrabytes of storage space, today hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes are no longer uncommon. Of course, companies do not collect and store these amounts of data for the “fun of it”, but because they are forced to do so due to regulatory requirements or because they expect tangible competitive advantages from it.

 

However, the data stored in the many heterogeneous IT systems can only serve as a basis for operational decisions to a limited extent. In case of doubt, they only depict a single fact from a business process, ideally an entire business process. It is therefore necessary to extract, harmonize, transform and combine the data from the different IT systems in order to obtain information from the data on the basis of which decisions can be made for the entire company.

 

At this point, we come full circle to the introduction of this blog post, because it is precisely this structured approach that characterizes Business Intelligence. To put it casually: a business intelligence consultant helps companies to bring order and structure to their “data chaos” and to generate real competitive advantages from the annoying duty of collecting data. In addition to the classic business evaluations that come to mind now, BI methods and processes can also be used for the digitalization of data-intensive company processes.  

 

The combination of technical and business issues is what makes my job so varied and appealing. In order to generate real insights and benefits for companies from operational data, it is not enough to understand only the technical or the business facts – exactly the right thing for me, who feels at home in both the world of IT and the world of business.

 

It was already relatively clear to me before my studies that I would like to work in a varied profession that allows me to get to know and understand many different industries and companies. In combination with the experience I gained during my self-employment, the step into consulting was obvious, as it allows a similarly free and independent way of working. In no other profession can my interests, experience and strengths be applied as well as in SAP Business Intelligence Consulting. For me, it is the perfect synthesis of all relevant factors.

 

My name is Leon Bergmann, I am 26 years old, I studied business informatics. I have been working for Rödl & Partner as an SAP BI Consultant for one year – my vocation is Business Intelligence – SAP BI Consultant: My dream job.