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If you do not love data analytics, it will be hard to become an analytics rock star. No significant accomplishments are achieved without passion. For many people, passion does not come naturally; it must be developed. Cultivate passion by setting goals and achieving them. Realize that the best opportunity in your life is the one in front of you right now. Focus on it, grow it, and develop your passion for it! That excitement will become obvious to those around you.

Dig down deeper about the business details of your company. What, exactly, does your company do? What are some of its challenges and opportunities? How would the company benefit from valuable and transformative information you can deliver? Take the time necessary to learn the skills that are valuable for your business and your career. Keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and available analytics tools -- learn and understand their capabilities, functions, and differences.

Deepen your knowledge with the tools that you are currently working on by picking new techniques and methodologies that make you a better professional in the field.

Improve your presentation and speaking skills, even if it is on your own time. Excellent and no-cost presentation training resources are readily available on the internet (for example, at http://www.mindtools.com/page8.html. Practice writing and giving presentations to friends and colleagues that will give you honest feedback. Once you have practiced the basic skills, you need to enhance your skills by improving your

You must be able to explain, justify, and "sell" your ideas to colleagues as well as business management. Organizational change does not happen overnight or as a result of one presentation. You need to be persistent and skillful in taking your ideas all the way up the leadership chain.

Tough analytics problems typically don't have an obvious answer -- that's why they're tough! Take the initiative by digging deep into those problems without being asked. Throw out all the assumptions made so far and follow logical trial and error methodology. First, develop a thesis about possible contributors to the problem at hand. Second, run the analytics to prove the thesis. Learn from that outcome and start over, if needed, until a significant answer is found. You are now well on your way to rock star status.

The potential benefits of business intelligence programs include accelerating and improving decision making; optimizing internal business processes; increasing operational efficiency; driving new revenues; and gaining competitive advantages over business rivals. BI systems can also help companies identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed.

BI data can include historical information, as well as new data gathered from source systems as it is generated, enabling BI analysis to support both strategic and tactical decision-making processes.

BI programs can also incorporate forms of advanced analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, text mining, statistical analysis and big data analytics.

In many cases though, advanced analytics projects are conducted and managed by separate teams of data scientists, statisticians, predictive modelers and other skilled analytics professionals, while BI teams oversee more straightforward querying and analysis of business data.

Business intelligence data typically is stored in a data warehouse or smaller data marts that hold subsets of a company's information. In addition, Hadoop systems are increasingly being used within BI architectures as repositories or landing pads for BI and analytics data, especially for unstructured data, log files, sensor data and other types of big data. Before it's used in BI applications, raw data from different source systems must be integrated, consolidated and cleansed using data integration and data quality tools to ensure that users are analyzing accurate and consistent information.

In addition to BI managers, business intelligence teams generally include a mix of BI architects, BI developers, business analysts and data management professionals; business users often are also included to represent the business side and make sure its needs are met in the BI development process.

To help with that, a growing number of organizations are replacing traditional waterfall development with Agile BI and data warehousing approaches that use Agile software development techniques to break up BI projects into small chunks and deliver new functionality to end users on an incremental and iterative basis.

consultant Howard Dresner is credited with first proposing it in 1989 as an umbrella category for applying data analysis techniques to support business decision-making processes.

Business intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with business analytics; in other cases, business analytics is used either more narrowly to refer to advanced data analytics or more broadly to include both BI and advanced analytics.