Business Intelligence (BI) systems are the heart of any company’s analytical capability. This course introduces the delegate to all the necessary terminology, architectures, approaches, skills, techniques, and infrastructure necessary to design and implement a successful BI system. The course focuses on the generic skills that are necessary to create an effective BI system and will teach you the skills that underpin good BI development no matter which software platform you use.
A Business Intelligence system has the potential to revolutionise your business. It can turn the mass of data that sits in your operational systems (Finance, HR, Sales etc.) into high quality, well-defined information. This information allows you to move from a ‘gut-feel’ approach of decision making to a proper, evidence-based approach. A well-designed Business Intelligence system collects the appropriate data from your operational systems and move it into a data warehouse. There it is restructured and organised for analytical purposes and often deployed to data marts. The approach, methodology and design techniques required to build a BI system differ significantly from those required to build operational systems and include ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), dimensional modelling and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing).