In this graduate-level course, explore how BI supports managerial decision-making, from data- and text-mining to warehousing and conducting analytics, and learn how to effectively report what you learn from data by creating visualizations to communicate your analysis.
Business management teams need good information to function. Having a strong business intelligence team supports data-driven decision-making at all levels and at all stages of an enterprise's lifecycle. Of course, having data alone is not enough. Knowing how to collect, filter, and analyze data and then report the intelligence gleaned from it ensures that management teams have what they need to make informed decisions. Business intelligence (BI) involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting data from reliable sources in formats that help the management team understand and use it efficiently. Throughout this graduate-level course, we will explore how BI can be used in every stage of the decision-making lifecycle and how and when to focus on specific BI applications and approaches.
From start-up through growth periods, to competition battles, through maturity and reinvestment or reinvention to prevent decline, business intelligence provides critical information about all aspects of the firm's health and prospects. Throughout the course, we will explore the use of BI in every stage of the life cycle to understand how and when to focus on BI applications and approaches.
For a real-world example, consider how you make decisions for yourself or your family. When you shop, do you choose products based on price? Packaging? Whether they're on sale? If you have a coupon? The prestige of the brand? A friend's or expert's recommendation? Product reviews? We collect and synergize this kind of information daily without thinking about how we do it. In this course, we will break down how businesses conduct this process at a larger scale – from recognizing a need to fulfilling it – just like you do when making decisions.
If you choose the wrong brand of shampoo, your family will get over it, but when a business makes the wrong choice, its bottom line suffers, and the company itself may fail to survive. This is the value of BI.
- Unit 1: Business Intelligence Overview
- Unit 2: BI as Business Support
- Unit 3: Data Mining and Text Mining
- Unit 4: Data Warehousing and Integration
- Unit 5: Data Analytics
- Unit 6: Data Reporting and Visualization
- Unit 7: Data Analysis Dashboards
- Unit 8: Project Management
- Describe how business intelligence concepts and processes have changed over time due to business needs and technological change;
- Explain how business intelligence supports managerial decision-making today;
- Describe the approaches to managerial decision-making at each level in an organization and across different types of organizations;
- Describe data- and text-mining processes;
- Evaluate which data warehousing approaches are most appropriate for your business case;
- Use common KPI (key performance indicators) to develop data visualization products to improve internal business processes;
- Model best practices in business intelligence by selecting appropriate data sets, extracting and exploiting data, and producing a data analysis;
- Infer actionable information from data through exploitation and analysis;
- Explain how the intelligence production process can be used to improve organizational decision-making; and
- Ensure intelligence products are decision-maker focused and aligned with BI requirements.