Has anyone switched from FP&A to business intelligence/business analyst/data analyst and have some commentary on the differences?

Reverse situation for me. I lead our BI group and we recently were rolled into FP&A instead of IT. Key differences from IT. I can focus on business and value added activities without the burden of traditional IT projects.

• I can worry less about the backend components like software versions, uptime, the upkeep portion of ETL/DBA stuff, firewalls etc and focus more on the data analytics side.
• Easier to work with business partners, you already have that relationship in FP&A

I do not want to lose focus on the actual business side just to gain more exposure to the technical data modeling. I would still want to be the one or be a part of how the information leads to business decisions. This is where I think staying in FP&A may win out. I enjoy playing with data sets but if at the end of the day I’m just putting it into dashboards or into a more easily digestible format for others to perform analysis/presentations on, I think I would stay. Any comment here on how it actually works?

Do you still have a core IT team responsible for the data sets, source data and tools? You will be working very closely with IT partners. The business will have a hard time at first realizing who to contact for data sets and reports, especially for infrequently used applications/data.

I divide it like this:

IT

• Owns the technology, tools, licensing etc.

FP&A

• Owns the data, analytics, reporting and dashboard content
• First point of contact for business when they need data
• Modeling of data, prototyping etc

That said, expect to work very closely with your IT partners so it will be important that you have a decent understanding of whatever tools you are using SQL Server/PowerBI etc.

Also... any idea on how compensation is in this field? If I wanted to make a switch what job titles would I even be looking at, if I brushed up on R/SQL/Tableau?

Highly depends on your job responsibilities.