Learning the Foundations of Business Intelligence

For my Spring 2022 semester, I was able to partake in the class ITSS 4351, or Foundations of Business Intelligence with Professor Gaurav Shekhar. As an ITS student, I was extremely excited to learn more about Business Intelligence in this class. Under the instruction of Professor Shekhar, I was able to not only learn how to utilize data to create visual diagrams but also see how businesses could make decisions based on data. In the class, I was granted the opportunity to use the programs Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Visual Studios. All of these programs allowed me to have a close experience with data analytics and they have helped me realize how easy it is to create information from data. 

As a visual and hands-on learner, I really enjoyed learning and using Tableau. Out of the multitude of charts and graphs we created in class, I personally really enjoyed learning to create the Butterfly chart and Donut chart. It was truly an exciting experience for me to create visual diagrams that I’ve only seen in textbooks and articles. Creating a very simple Donut chart felt like a huge challenge at the start of the semester, but now after this class, I feel as if I could accomplish a lot more on Tableau.

As someone who loves to see the probability of possibilities, I found that the best part of the class was when we were able to use Microsoft Visual Studio to data mine and predict the probability of a purchase from a customer. I have always been interested in learning more about data mining, and I am very grateful to have had the experience of learning it in this class. I am sure there are a plethora of skills I have yet to learn with data mining, and I am excited to have a basic knowledge of how it works. It would be an understatement to say that I am more than eager to learn more from now.

This class was truly a great experience for me as not only a student but also as an aspiring data architect. Seeing the depth of business intelligence was a very enlightening experience for me, as I could see how information from data could be utilized to make possibly risky business decisions. I hope to apply my newly earned knowledge and skills to my future jobs and acquire more skills as I become more familiar and advanced with such programs.