In most modern enterprises, Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) Systems represent a core enabler of decision-making in that they are supplying up-to-date and accurate information about all relevant aspects of a company’s planning and operations: from stock levels to sales volumes, from process cycle times to key indicators of corporate performance. Modern BI&A systems leverage beyond reporting and dashboards also advanced analytical functions.  Thus, today they also play a major role in enabling data-driven products and services. The aim of this course is to introduce theoretical foundations, concepts, tools, and current practice of BI&A Systems from a managerial and technical perspective.

The course is complemented with an engineering capstone project, where students work in a team with real-world use cases and data in order to create running Business intelligence & Analytics system prototypes.

Learning objectives

• Understand the theoretical foundations of key Business Intelligence & Analytics concepts supporting decision-making
• Explore key capabilities of state-of-the-art Business Intelligence & Analytics Systems
• Learn how to successfully implement and run Business Intelligence & Analytics Systems from multiple perspectives, e.g. architecture, data management, consumption, analytics
• Get hands-on experience by working with Business Intelligence & Analytics Systems with real-world use cases and data

Prerequisites

This course is limited to a capacity of 50 places. The capacity limitation is due to the attractive format of the accompanying engineering capstone project. Strong analytic abilities and profound skills in SQL as wells as Python and/or R are required. Students have to apply with their CV and transcript of records.

• Turban, E., Aronson, J., Liang T.-P., Sharda, R. 2008. “Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems”.
• Watson, H. J. 2014. “Tutorial: Big Data Analytics: Concepts, Technologies, and Applications,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems (34), p. 24.
• Arnott, D., and Pervan, G. 2014. “A critical analysis of decision support systems research revisited: The rise of design science,” Journal of Information Technology (29:4), Nature Publishing Group, pp. 269–293 (doi: 10.1057/jit.2014.16).
• Carlo, V. (2009). “Business intelligence: data mining and optimization for decision making”. Editorial John Wiley and Sons, 308-317.
• Chen, H., Chiang, R. H. L, and Storey, V. C. 2012. „Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact,“ MIS Quarterly (36:4), pp. 1165-1188.
• Davenport, T. 2014. Big Data @ Work, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review.
• Economist Intelligence Unit. 2015 “Big data evolution: Forging new corporate capabilities for the long term”
• Power, D. J. 2008. “Decision Support Systems: A Historical Overview,” Handbook on Decision Support Systems, pp. 121–140 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-48713-5_7).
• Sharma, R., Mithras, S., and Kankanhalli, A. 2014. „Transforming decision-making processes: a research agenda for understanding the impact of business analytics on organisations,“ European Journal of Information Systems (23:4), pp. 433-441.
• Silver, M. S. 1991. “Decisional Guidance for Computer-Based Decision Support,” MIS Quarterly (15:1), pp. 105-122.

Further literature will be made available in the lecture.