BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE; AN EDUCATIONAL CASE STUDY

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 usually a 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 any 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.
In the Computer Science (CS) undergraduate university curriculum the topic of Business Intelligence may be touched upon very 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 Management Information Systems (MIS) curriculum some additional mentioning is usually done in an Information Systems course. Such brief coverage of the topic, paired with the absence of simple and inexpensive educational tools that could easily demonstrate its practical implementation, are not enough to stress the magnitude of BI to students. Thus, addressing the need for an educational case and tool which can be used to demonstrate in a simple but realistic way the use of BI to students, we devised the case that is described in this paper.

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