Foundations of Business Intelligence
Having taken data analytics classes before this semester, and not fully grasping Business Intelligence software such as JMP Pro or XLMiner beyond what was shown in class. Lowered my expectations for Foundations of Business Intelligence taught by Professor Gaurav Shekhar. My first impressions of Professor Shekhar also didn’t help as initially, he came off similar to one of those professors who expected so much from you while not delivering the material to help you succeed. The first few weeks of our lectures were going over definitions. The lessons beyond that were fully hands-on. Though we were encouraged to watch how to complete tasks and practice in our free time, I chose to practice during the lecture by following along and then practicing again later with assignments.
Using Visual Studio, MS SQL Server Management Studio, and Tableau. We covered various topics throughout the semester. Topics include OLAP, the ETL process, Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services. Tableau was a software that I had very little knowledge of before this class. However, I soon discovered its usefulness when creating numerous graphs and charts that give a more in-depth visualization of the data you want to analyze. All semester Professor Shekhar taught us that our data should tell a story. When correctly used, Tableau makes storytelling easy. Leading to one of my favorite parts of this class, which was the final project. While my group had the freedom to choose a serious topic to impress the panel of judges. We decided to choose a topic we found fun in comparing Michael Jordan, Lebron James, and Kobe Bryant. The storyboard we created ended up being praised by the panel for our ability to let our data tell a story.
Before this class, I was unaware of how powerful Visual Studio was for Business Intelligence due to only using it in programming causing me to recognize it as a programming tool. However, once we started getting hands-on, I was able to see the tricks Visual Studio has up its sleeve. It allowed us to easily extract, transform and load our data from our MS SQL Server to and create models that helped us predict consumer behaviors in our case was Bike Buyers. While our data was just sample data, I could only imagine how far businesses could go when implementing these tools with real-world data to gain additional consumer insights.
Overall, Foundations of Business Intelligence was a class I misjudged at the beginning of the semester. I'm glad that my initial judgment was incorrect because with the help of Professor Shekhar's excellent teaching style. I was able to build a strong foundational knowledge of Business Intelligence.
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