Course Learning Objectives

Course Learning Objectives

The major objectives of the course are for the student to develop a strong understanding of the role of computers in direct support of managerial decision making (business intelligence) and to apply this understanding, as well as prerequisite programming skills to the design and development of systems for managerial decision support.

The fundamental objective of this course is for the student to develop knowledge and expertise on "how to select and/or develop, and deploy an information system to help a manager in decision making."

Specifically, each student should develop:

• Knowledge about managerial decision making and business intelligence
• Knowledge about Decision Support Systems (DSS)/Business Intelligence (BI)/Business Analytics (BA), and how they relate to other types of Information Systems
• Knowledge about the concepts of decision support and expert systems structure and the principles of their design
• Knowledge about how DSS/BI/BA can be used effectively in decision making
• Knowledge about DSS/BI/BA software - a general understanding and some hands-on capability
• Knowledge about DSS/BI/BA development methodologies
• Knowledge about potential future developments in the DSS/BI/BA field (emerging technologies) for life-long learning

Upon completion of this course, each student should be able to:

• Analyze managerial decision situations to determine whether it is practical to support them with computer technology and, if so, how.
• Work on DSS/BI development projects in a team environment.
• Select and/or develop, and deploy successful business intelligence systems to assist managers in decision making.

Course Description

From the course catalog:

“BUS INTELLIGENCE: Business intelligence provides the highest level of information support to aid the manager in the decision-making process. The course provides the skills necessary to conceptualize, build, and implement systems utilizing business intelligence in organizations.”

The widespread adoption of sophisticated transaction processing systems has given businesses huge volumes of operational data. BI consists of the techniques, tools and processes that can flexibly report, analyze and make predictions using this wealth of information. In some cases these capabilities can support strategic, tactical and operational decisions that support the existing business strategy but BI can also generate significant new applications that provide competitive advantage.  Examples include the Wal-Mart supplier system, airline yield (revenue) management systems, Web retail recommendation engines, and financial fraud prevention capabilities.

Students will get “hands on” experience with a variety of decision support software and access to a sophisticated data warehouse for multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP). Among the topics covered will be decision making (rational and non-rational), data warehousing, data mining and expert systems.

In general, BI systems have been used by large companies utilizing expensive special purpose hardware and software requiring significant investments in training and support. This is starting to change. Oracle, IBM, HP, SAP and Microsoft have all recently acquired specialized BI tool vendors and they are increasingly including BI functionality in their standard products. BI is moving into the mainstream and will increasingly be used in small and medium sized businesses and at all levels in the organization.

Class deliverables include individual and group assignments and presentations. Most assignments will be group assignments. The group should pick a collaborative system to support their various projects. One of the group projects will include a detailed discussion of how the collaborative system was used.

Page maintained by JE Aronson
Last Modified: August 17, 2009