The MIS 587 Business Intelligence course seems very interesting and important for my future career. I have currently been working with SQL Server 2008. I am looking forward to learning more about Data warehousing with Terradata, since I have not used this tool before, and using Social Media to influence business decisions.

Since my concentration will be in BI, I decided to do some research to understand what business intelligence consists of. According to Wikipedia:

"Business intelligence (BI) mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting,^{[clarification needed]} and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.^[1]
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics."

Based on this definition, data is the primary component that is needed to drive business intelligence. I have worked on many projects that use the ETL (extract, transform, load) procedure to create various databases or data warehouses. Below is an image that illustrates the ETL procedure along with how to create Business intelligence from it.

  

Source: http://www.avanco.com/sol_business_intel.html

From this course, I am hoping to add new tools and procedures to my skill set so that I can use business intelligence to help a future company.