BI is a broad and complex field that encompasses many disciplines. Therefore BI professionals as a group cover an equally broad range of skills and disciplines ranging from highly technical areas such as systems administration to business-oriented skills, defining and working with analytics.

Seattle, Washington, based The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) segments BI professionals into five specialty areas:
Leadership & Management is a key success factor for business intelligence programs and projects, with strong focus on effectively integrating people, processes, and technology to deliver business value. The field requires process knowledge, including development methodology, program and project management, as well as organizational and team-building skills.

Business Analytics focuses on effective use of data and information to drive positive business actions. The body of knowledge for this area includes both business and technical topics, including concepts of performance management, definition and delivery of business metrics, data visualization, and deployment and use of technology solutions such as OLAP, dashboards, scorecards, analytic applications, and data mining.

Data Analysis & Design All business intelligence applications depend on quality Data Analysis and Design. Analysis concentrates on understanding business requirements for data and information. Design focuses on translating business information into data structures. Core skills include information needs analysis, specification of business metrics, and data modeling. Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts, architectures and processes is also essential.

Data Integration is fundamental to data warehousing and is a vital process for a rich and robust data resource to deliver Business Intelligence solutions. Integration includes all of the activities necessary to acquire data from sources, and to transform and cleanse the data. The body of knowledge includes concepts and skills for source data analysis and qualification, data profiling, source/target mapping, data cleansing and ETL development.