BUS610: Business Intelligence and Analytics

Welcome to BUS610: Business Intelligence

Specific information about this course and its requirements can be found below. For more general information about taking Saylor Academy courses, including information about Community and Academic Codes of Conduct, please read the Student Handbook.

Course Description

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.

Course Introduction

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.

This course includes the following units:

• 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

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• 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.

Throughout this course, you will also see learning outcomes in each unit. You can use those learning outcomes to help organize your studies and gauge your progress.

Course Materials

The primary learning materials for this course are readings, lectures, and videos.

All course materials are free to access and can be found in each unit of the course. Pay close attention to the notes that accompany these course materials, as they will tell you what to focus on in each resource and will help you to understand how the learning materials fit into the course as a whole. You can also see a list of all the learning materials in this course by clicking on Resources in the navigation bar.

Evaluation and Minimum Passing Score

Only the final exam is considered when awarding you a grade for this course. In order to pass this course, you will need to earn a 70% or higher on the final exam. Your score on the exam will be calculated as soon as you complete it. If you do not pass the exam on your first try, you may take it again as many times as you want, with a 7-day waiting period between each attempt. Once you have successfully passed the final exam, you will be awarded a free  Course Completion Certificate.

There are end-of-unit assessments in this course. These are designed to help you study and do not factor into your final course grade. You can take these as many times as you want to until you understand the concepts and material covered. You can see all of these assessments by clicking on Quizzes in the course's navigation bar.

Tips for Success

BUS610: Business Intelligence and Analytics is a self-paced course, which means that you can decide when you will start and when you will complete the course. There is no instructor or set schedule to follow. We estimate that the "average" student will take 83 hours to complete this course. We recommend that you work through the course at a pace that is comfortable for you and allows you to make regular progress. It's a good idea to also schedule your study time in advance and try as best as you can to stick to that schedule.

Learning new material can be challenging, so we've compiled a few study strategies to help you succeed:

• Take notes on the various terms, practices, and theories that you come across. This can help you put each concept into context and will create a refresher that you can use as you study later on.
• As you work through the materials, take some time to test yourself on what you remember and how well you understand the concepts. Reflecting on what you've learned is important for your long-term memory and will make you more likely to retain information over time.

Technical Requirements

This course is delivered entirely online. You will be required to have access to a computer or web-capable mobile device and have consistent access to the internet to either view or download the necessary course resources and to attempt any auto-graded course assessments and the final exam.

• To access the full course, including assessments and the final exam, you will need to be logged into your Saylor Academy account and enrolled in the course. If you do not already have an account, you may create one for free here. Although you can access some of the course without logging in to your account, you should log in to maximize your course experience. For example, you cannot take assessments or track your progress unless you are logged in.

For additional guidance, check out Saylor Academy's FAQ.

Fees

This course is entirely free to enroll in and to access. Everything linked in the course, including textbooks, videos, webpages, and activities, are all available for no charge. This course also contains a free final exam and course completion certificate.