Business intelligence made simple

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to a very broad category of applications which assist executive business users to improve their decision making and strategic planning by collecting, storing and analysing a usually large volume of historically collected data and providing access to powerful and dynamic query results. Business Intelligence Systems (BIS) are also sometimes referred to as Decision Support Systems due to the fact that they provide support to users and organisations concerning their decision making. Without a doubt, BI is extremely vital for all organisations in today's competitive business environment where even the smallest detail could affect the future of an organization. The study of BI is of interest to Computer Science (CS) and possibly the related Computer Engineering majors as well as Management Information Systems (MIS) and in broad to Business Studies majors. A course on BI is not usually a major requirement in any one of these curriculums, and it may not even appear as a major elective but rather be included in some other related course. For example, in the CS undergraduate university curriculum the topic of Business Intelligence may be touched upon briefly in a course on Database Management and in the graduate CS curriculum it usually becomes part of a Knowledge Management course. In the undergraduate (MIS) curriculum some additional mentioning is usually made in an Information Systems course. The brief coverage of the topic and the absence of simple and inexpensive educational tools that could easily explore the role of BI to students do not allow the educator to stress the magnitude of BI. This paper addresses the need for an educational case which will demonstrate to the students the process used to create a BI application and the subsequent use of the BI tool in a simple but realistic way. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.