Business intelligence projects in second year information systems courses

Abstract

In recent years Business Intelligence (BI) has been rated by international academics and chief information officers (CIOs) as one of the most, if not the most, important application areas of information systems (IS). In many undergraduate university IS curricula, however, BI is only briefly mentioned, sometimes under the topic of Decision Support Systems (DSS), but students rarely gain a practical understanding of what it means and how it is used in practice by end users.This paper describes experiences of the author over five years of introducing practical BI projects to a 2nd year class of IS majors in a database systems course, and most recently, to a 2nd year class of 650 accounting and finance majors in a general course on IT in Business. In each case only five lectures were available to cover the topic of BI, including DSS, data warehousing, data mining, OLAP, and corporate performance management. Because of its relative user-friendliness and widespread use in industry OLAP was chosen for the project. Students were given large commercial datasets to analyse, using leading BI software products. In answering a range of questions, they had to assume the roles of an international product manager as well as a country manager for a global organization.The paper describes the objectives of the exercise, how software, data and project questions were selected for the project each year, the experiences of project teams and the lecturer, constraints and challenges faced, and overall learning points. It starts with an introduction into BI and its typical components and activities, then turns to IS at the University of Cape Town. The use of projects and some related educational issues are discussed, then the history of the projects from 2004 to 2008 is outlined. The conclusion comes after discussion and some learning points.