This course introduces concepts in business intelligence and explores how business intelligence (BI) can help improve management effectiveness through better decision-making in several functional areas such as marketing, finance, and manufacturing. This course will explore applications of BI, such as online analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards, management reporting, performance measurement, and data visualization, and how these are developed and applied. It will also investigate BI in the context of decision-making and closely related areas such as data warehousing, data marts, business analytics, web analytics, real-time data, and mobile applications. Students will gain hands-on experience through assignments and projects using a comprehensive set of current BI tools.
Pre-requisites IT110 OR MSIS110 AND IT230L OR MSIS411
Weclome to Business Intelligence!
What is Business Intelligence?
Have you ever shopped with Amazon and wondered
how they made the recommendations and offers
that they give you? Or wondered how Google ranks
and customizes the webpages it shows when you do
a search? Or how a bank could make a decision for
approving a loan application almost instantly?
Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics is the
answer to these and thousands of other questions.
Amazon and Google are among the leading
companies who know how to use BI to take
advantage of the enormous amount of data they
collect and analyze, and because of the low cost of
building and analyzing immense databases, so have
thousands of other companies. These companies
recognize that BI is critical for them in order to
compete effectively, and they use it in all facets of
their organizations - from gaining a better
understanding the needs of their customers, to
customizing their products to those needs, to
improving the efficiency of their operations, and to
making better decisions at all levels, from tactical to
strategic.
The Business Intelligence track in IT at CM is
designed to prepare students to understand
methods and software used for BI and analytics, to
undertake analyses of big data, and to b.
What Career Paths can I go into?
As organizations have become increasingly aware of
the capabilities offered by BI and analytics, the
number of jobs for professionals who have
technical and managerial skills for BI has grown
dramatically. As the use of BI increases and current
trends such as mobile BI, BI for “big data”, and BI in
the cloud become a reality, the number of job
openings and the need for skilled professionals in
this field will only continue to expand.
Students graduating from the BI track can expect to
find jobs in businesses, government agencies, and
non-profit organizations. Students may assume job
titles like BI Developer, Business Analyst, Data
Warehousing Specialist, Predictive Modeling
Analyst, or Project Manager.
Advising Notes
College of Management students should see general
advising from the University Advising Center until they
have earned 60 credits and selected a track.
Students seeking advising regarding track courses
should see a faculty mentor for their chosen track
(names available in the College advising offices
respectively). Advising for degree exceptions and
policy overrides should go through the advising office
for the College in which the student is enrolled (CM
students should go to M-5-610), as appropriate.
Students should plan to take the track courses over
the course of two years (four semesters) to ensure a
wide selection of required and elective courses in the
concentration. Some track courses may be offered
once a year and are subject to sequencing due to prerequisites, making this time allowance necessary.
The pre-requisites for these courses are strictly
enforced; students should plan their schedule
early and carefully.
Take all three of these required courses:
Two courses selected from these electives:
This course explains the core applications of a typical organization to support their fundamental business functions. It explains the role of IT in attaining competitive advantage and how modern organizations configure commercially available products to satisfy their information needs. The course makes extensive use of collaborative technologies and business applications to demonstrate the work of virtual teams and how they implement their operations.
Pre-requisites 60 credits.
This course provides students with the technical skills required to plan and implement a data warehouse using a database management system. It describes basic data warehousing concepts. The course covers design and implementation of data marts and operational data stores. Topics include dimensional data modeling for warehouses, CUBES and storage modes including MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP, and data warehousing infrastructure and analytical service tool selection. This course involves designing a data warehousing system and the implementation of a database with a stare schema, gathering data from primary data sources, transforming data, and loading it into a database management system. Students create cubes using OLAP and analyze cube data using client application.
This course provides a broad overview of the threats to the security of information systems, the responsibilities and basic tools to ensure information security, and the levels of training and expertise needed in organizations to reach and maintain a state of acceptable security. Students will learn and understand the key issues associated with protecting information assets, determining the levels of protection and response to security incidents, and designing a consistent, reasonable information security system, with appropriate intrusion detection and reporting features. IT 428L and MSIS 428L are the same course.
Data Mining provides a set of techniques that explore large quantities of data to discover meaningful patterns and make predictions. It helps businesses analyze data from different perspectives, gain insights into the vast amount of data extracted from internal and external sources, and to measure performance, reduce costs, and seek competitive advantage. As a result, data mining has become vital to most enterprises today. This course introduces data mining through an investigation of its underlying concepts, and explores practical methods for its application. Students will learn the appropriate use of several data mining methods based on unsupervised algorithms such as cluster analysis and association rules, and those based on supervised algorithms such as decision trees and neural networks. Students will gain experience with applications of data mining using current enterprise software such as IBM SPSS Modeler.
Pre-requisites
IT110 OR MSIS110 AND IT230L OR MSIS411
This course explains the activities and the relationships between data, information, and knowledge that are created, stored, protected, and optimized for access with the latest storage and communication technologies. The course focuses on the combined network and storage architectures required to provide solutions and provide the ability to scale rapidly to meet the expanded needs of future applications. The course addresses questions such as: how to architect and select an optimal storage network, how to determine and select the correct size and type of storage, how to define and apply the best storage configuration to protect users' data, how to ensure data storage and accessibility align with the business continuity plan, how to select the best techniques for facilitation backup and recovery of lost or corrupted data, how to provide local and remote data replication, and how to monitor, report, and manage large amounts of data over time.
Pre-requisites IT110 OR MSIS110 AND IT230L OR MSIS411
This course develops an understanding of applications architecture based on building IT systems out of common parts and a service-oriented architecture. These are collections of information services, modules and functional components that can be reused in a variety of common contexts. The course will apply several tools to exemplify the use of heterogeneous reusable modules to fulfill an information service. An underlying methodology for integration will be applied.
Pre-requisites 60 credits.
Introduces recent approaches to the analysis and design of computer information systems, including the hands-on use of computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools. The changing role of the systems analyst in both operations and systems applications in today's organizations is examined. The course critically analyzes systems development methodologies, including life cycle models and prototyping; reviews user-led developments and current approaches which facilitate user-developer collaboration; discusses effective diagramming and notational techniques now available to define and document functional requirements and operational business processes; and examines current methods used to test and evaluate the accuracy, completeness, and usability of documented requirements and convert them into efficient systems design or re-engineering processes. Topics include CASE tools, module and transaction design, human-computer interfaces, and system configuration. This course includes practical experience in analyzing and designing an organizational application. It discusses the concept of quality as applied to information systems and business process redesign as well as the role of information systems in managing quality within an organization.
IT 461L and MSIS 461L are the same course.
Pre-requisites IT110 and 60 credits
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