My Experiences through Foundations of Business Intelligence

Is data really the new gold? Well, if my class, Foundations of Business Intelligence, has taught me anything, it is that insights from data can speak volumes and drive business decisions, which does make data a valuable resource. But to get to those insights, we need be able to clean and understand the data with tools like the ones that our class has learned during this course: Tableau, Microsoft Visual Studio, and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). I have used these tools to learn about data visualization, data wrangling, and machine learning, and I hope to apply these skills to collect data insights that are as valuable as gold.

Data visualization has become integral in corporations’ decision-making processes. It allows for decision makers to quickly and clearly grasp what actions need to be taken, and Tableau has addressed these exact aspects of Business Intelligence (BI). Through my Tableau journey, I have learned how to use the tool to clean data, create various graphs and charts, and effectively present the data insights to an audience. As I work towards entering the Data Science field, I will be able to use these skills to become the middleman between the data and business management.  My next steps in learning Tableau would be to achieve a Tableau Specialist Certification, practice using Tableau Public, and potentially use Python with Tableau.

Coming into this class, the students had experience with SQL, but we got a new opportunity to use SSMS with Visual Studio. We managed to create ETL processes, use SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to analyze and report data, and use machine learning models. Previously, I had learned how to develop a few machine learning models using scikit-learn from Python, but Visual Studio made that process much simpler with no required code. With tools like this, Business Intelligence has become more efficient, automated, and fast-paced than ever.

The best part of this course was the final group project in which we created a Tableau story for analyzing FIFA 2020 soccer players. We had the opportunity to present to real-world professionals and have them provide us with feedback. The project allowed us to apply multiple Tableau lessons while teaching us how to present insights in a professional setting.

After learning all these tools, I can confidently say that I have a firm foundation of Business Intelligence, but my journey does not stop here. I would like to expand on my data knowledge by learning Big Data tools like Hadoop and Spark as well as some Python libraries like Keras and Tensorflow. With these tools combined with the BI knowledge from this course, I hope to truly bring out the potential value that data has to offer.