Course in Business Intelligence

At IIM-C we firmly believe that information is power. In the years to come the need for increased sharing of information will govern the changes in organizational structure. A basic understanding of information systems is thus mandatory. We endeavor to ensure that you drive the e-commerce revolution. These courses not only equip you with software tools but also impart an understanding of the hardware which will help you set design your own database. It's time you started your own dotcom at IIMC.
Course Objectives

Introduction:

In recent years, business intelligence systems have played pivotal roles in helping organizations to fine-tune business goals such as improving customer retention, market penetration, profitability and efficiency. In most cases, these insights are driven by analyses of historic data. With more and more companies maintaining customer and transactional databases and data warehouses, data mining has become an important and integral component of doing business in a global context. Thus the case of acquiring business intelligence for today's business has become indisputable.

As knowledge is becoming more and more synonymous to wealth creation and as a strategy plan for competing in the market place can be no better than the information on which it is based, the importance of knowledge and information in today's business can never be seen as external factors to the business. In the information age, where majority of the businesses are going global, where organizations are changing themselves from multi-national to global to metanational, where businesses of complimentary skills are joining hands to form alliances, the only central theme that determines the winners and the losers are but information solely. Companies, which have access to the right information at the right moment, have greater chances of being successful in this epoch of cutthroat competition. But to compete successfully, an organization must understand the typical arena in which it is competing and must recognize who its competitors are. Business Intelligence is all about this. Again with the rapid growth of Information Technology and the way it has revolutionized the way businesses are done, the field of competitive strategies have also become afflicted. With the latest trends in data mining, it becomes very easy to get a proactive and prospective information delivery along with the exact patterns that will have maximum interestingness for the top management decision makers.

Course Objectives:


This course of Business Intelligence (BI) provides a holistic understanding of Business Intelligence, it gives a comprehensive overview of all the major areas of study namely Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Data Warehousing and Data Mining, which are related to or constitute the area of Business Intelligence. In this course, the students are exposed to the need of BI and how to tackle the quest for gaining intelligence successfully. The major aspect of the course will be on showing various applications of Business Intelligence in various facets of today's management. The course also emphasizes on the knowledge discovered from the data as a strategic asset for the organization and looks into how it can be used for Competitive Intelligence (CI) in today's world of cut-throat competition.

The course will make the students go through a number of articles and cases related to Business Intelligence and will encourage class-room discussion on how Business Intelligence can creep into other areas of decision making as well. Hands on sessions will also be conducted on SAS data mining software.

In brief, this course is aimed at helping students understand and appreciate the following:

1. Explain the nature and role of business intelligence in contributing to the delivery of business value in modern organizations.

2. Understand the key processes underlying competitive intelligence and learn the tools & techniques of competitive intelligence
3. Distinguish between the concepts of knowledge Management and Business intelligence.
4. Relate the business intelligence environment, specifically data warehousing and data mining, to different organizational contexts.
5. Explain the need for a data integration process, data profiling, data cleansing and data enhancement, and their contribution to adding value to data
6. Application of Business Intelligence to various facets of Management like: Marketing, Strategy and Finance.


Pedagogy

Classroom Lectures, Case Discussions, Presentations and Lab sessions.
Lab Sessions: Lab sessions on SAS (to be conducted by Sri Samir K. Sadhukhan)
Software requirements: The license for SAS has to be renewed.