The course is offered on the Master's programme in Information Systems, to exchange students and as a freestanding course..

Course description

The course aims to give an introduction and overview of Business Intelligence (BI), which encompasses a broad category of technologies, applications, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data. This facilitates better decision-making for various users within the organization, ultimately enhancing organizational performance. Numerous organizations have consistently ranked BI as their top priority among application and technology advancements, which attracts most of the investments and garners substantial attention from the leadership. The course's main goal is to strike a balance between theory and practice by considering the demands of the current employment requirements in ICT and business trends.

The course explores BI at both micro and macro levels. At the micro level, the development of BI applications is covered by defining a business problem and identifying the necessary data to answer the identified problem. Students will work in small groups to address a real-world problem given a set of data. As part of the assignment each group must hand in a written report and make an oral presentation. The overarching goal is that students should acquire knowledge on how to develop BI applications and design BI solutions for different BI users and use cases.

At the macro level, the course explores theoretical advancements of BI from the standpoint of information systems and overarching effects of BI across the entire organization. Issues related to data integration, data modelling, data quality, meta-data, data management, BI architecture, data visualization, data storytelling, Big Data and scalability are addressed. Moreover, contemporary BI trends, such as BI governance, privacy, ethics, and AI are also partly covered. Overall, the course describes the evolution and current state of BI theory and practice.

Teaching method: Lectures, tutorials (where students can verify, supported by lecturer, their understanding of topics through warm-up exercises), guest lectures from industry and/or academic experts, seminars, computer laboratories, and individual and group supervision through office hours.

The course doesn't require any programming and database knowledge, but having such knowledge can be advantageous, particularly since Qlik Sense and Power BI are used in the group project for creating a BI application. As part of the course enrollment process, Qlik Sense licenses are allocated to students in the beginning of the course.