Foundations of Business Intelligence
As data increases in velocity, volume, veracity more and more organizations are looking to adopt data-driven strategies to gain competitive advantage by uncovering hidden insights, gaps, trends, patterns, and characteristics. There are many incredible BI analytics and data management tools in the market and this class has prepared me to stay abreast with the most useful and applicable tools in the real-world industry, hence, utilizing that knowledge and skill to bring value and growth to my future employment.
During this semester, I had the opportunity of taking Professor Shekhar’s Foundations of Business Intelligence class, also known as FBI, which introduced us to various BI tools that facilitate analyzing business performance through data-driven insights by understanding present and historical data to help drive better decision-making. Before this class, I had some knowledge of SQL but this class took my experience to another level. Out of many incredible BI tools, my favorite is MS Visual Studio, which propelled me to create data mining models such as Decision Trees, Clustering, and Artificial Neural Networks to identify trends and patterns and discover useful information from raw data. We also acquired and solidified our knowledge in SQL Server Management Studio to configure, manage, and administer data. In addition, we dived into Tableau and Alteryx to create engaging data visualizations and automate the data transformation and manipulation process.
Throughout the semester, we were given assignments that provided us hands-on training in manipulating and analyzing data while building a collaborative and uplifting learning experience and by the end of the semester I was able to complete my assignments with ease and authority. I am confident I have gained the skills needed to succeed and become a valuable and impactful team player for my future organizations.
At the end of the semester, it was great to see all the group presentations and watch their stories be brought to life through data visualization. When presenting insights, it is not merely enough to read numbers, which highlights the importance of data storytelling and bringing data to life. Drilling down relevant details and communicating your findings in a meaningful way translate into knowledge and a better decision-making process. For our final group project, we cleansed and transformed our dataset and visualized our insights on Tableau. We then presented our findings to a panel of industry professionals and were provided with amazing positive feedback. This was such a great experience, I learned so much not just from presenting our insights but from the process itself that got us to the final project. I want to thank my professor once again for his dedication to his students, this experience would not have been the same without his motivation and support, I’m excited to take all that I have learned and leverage my skills in future projects.
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