BI Roles and Teams
Who owns what, and where the hand-offs break
A BI organization is made of architects, engineers, analysts, report developers, stewards and consumers — each with distinct responsibilities and hand-offs.
What you will learn
- Map the common BI roles to their responsibilities and tools
- Describe the analyst-to-developer-to-steWard hand-off
- Diagnose org problems that show up as data problems
What is this?
BI work is a relay of specialists. Platform/data engineers build pipelines; modelers and analysts define the semantic layer; report/BI developers build and maintain reports; stewards govern content and access; power users and executives consume. Teams that blur these roles end up with no owner when something breaks.
Why do you need it?
- Each stage has a distinct skill, SLA and failure mode; one person doing all of it doesn't scale.
- Clear ownership means every dataset and report has exactly one pager.
- Good hand-offs (documented sources, certified metrics) are how trust survives staff changes.
- Knowing the roles helps you place blame correctly and staff correctly.
Mental model
A newsroom
A BI team
Reporters (analysts) gather facts; editors (modelers/stewards) set standards; designers and printers (developers) produce the final paper; the editor-in-chief (exec) reads it every morning. Each role fails differently and needs its own ownership.
How it works
- Data/platform engineers own ingestion and warehouse availability.
- Analytics engineers and modelers own the semantic layer: definitions, tests, certifications.
- BI/report developers build, test, publish and maintain dashboards and paginated reports.
- Data stewards curate catalogs, certify content, manage access and resolve lineage questions.
- Power users build self-serve reports on certified datasets; executives consume scorecards.
BI roles and the lines of responsibility.
In production
- A platform team owns warehouse SLAs; a analytics-engineering squad owns metric definitions; a BI developer squad owns published reports; stewards review certifications monthly.
- When a dashboard breaks, the runbook pages by layer: report code → model → pipeline.
- A power user community lives in a central workspace, inheriting certified datasets and governance.
Best practices
- Give every dataset and report exactly one owner in the catalog.
- Write ownership matrices so an incident routes to the right pager in one hop.
- Make hand-offs artifacts, not conversations: tests, docs and lineage at each boundary.
- Rotate stewards through the analyst seats so governance stays informed by reality.
Common mistakes
- One 'BI person' owns everything — the single point of failure with nothing documented.
- Developers and analysts both editing the metric definition, forking it.
- Stewardship as a ceremonial title with no power or time budget.
- No consumer representation in prioritization, so teams build what nobody needs.
Debugging tips
- An incident that spans layers means the hand-off docs are weak; fix the artifact, not just the data.
- Slow delivery often means the analyst-to-developer boundary has no tested model to hand over.
- Survey which role owns 'revenue' — if two do, you've found the fork.
Interview checkpoint
Quick quiz
Who is the best owner for ensuring a metric's definition never forks?
A 'data steward' mainly builds dashboards.