Lecture 1: Buzziness Intelligence

And today was my first “lecture” but it did not seem to be, because of the overflowing posts and tweets that were flying since last Wednesday. As soon as I entered the class I could see a bunch of my classmates crowding near the TA table. I did not give it much of an importance because I was rather very much interested in securing a seat in the first or the second row (I usually tend to lose my concentration-(polished way of saying ”I fall asleep”) after the first half-an-hour lecture and BI is not a course where I’m supposed to do it...!). After settling down in the second row I heard Snehal calling me to ask whether I had signed the attendance sheet or not. Okaye so that long- queue was for the Attendance Sheet .(Attendance also counts for the 15%  for class participation).

Dr.Sudha Ram, my professor for MIS 587-Business Intelligence had arrived, three minutes before the clock ticked 8 o’clock. I could see her busily writing down the agenda for the class in a corner of the white board.  We settled down almost 5 minutes past 8 o’clock after everyone had signed the attendance sheet. And then my professor began her lecture with a simple question ( not really..!! ) “What is Business Intelligence?” I was trying to recollect what all I had read during the past 4 days from all the tweets and facebook posts and before I could frame my thoughts someone answered saying its “Collection of Unstructured Data”. Then I could hear people giving out random answers like “BI deals with historical data”, “BI is used for prediction”, ”BI helps identify trends”, ”BI helps gain competitive advantage for a company”..And finally the class came into a consensus after my professor summed up all the points and defined BI as “Collection,measurement,understanding,analysis and prediction using data for performance management.”

While talking about data she did stress on the differences between internal and external data. From what I understood is that Internal data is the data that is collected from the day to day operations of the business, something like the sales data of a particular product, transactional data in banks, enrolment data in school and so on. While external data is something that is gathered from forums, networking websites like facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. So for a business to predict its growth it definitely needs to analyse both these forms of data.

Someone did ask a very interesting question, “How do we rely on these data? What if people are just bluffing?” Pretty much an argumentative topic. After all its using the data from external sources we predict our business growth. So how do we trust these data? And then came the answer from our professor, that Data Profiling is the process of examining the data for its authenticity and purity.

{ My findings:  Data profiling is a method used to analyse data from data warehouses to clarify the structure, content, relationships and derivation rules of the data. The results of the analysis is used in making strategic business decisions. There are several different kinds of Data profiling techniques}

Data , Social Media and Prediction were the three constantly used words in class. I could hear it from every corner of my class. There was another intuitive question asked by one of my batch mates, “Why can’t we do all these collection, analysis and prediction using some JAVA algorithm?” Oh GOD are we going to talk about ALGOS in class now.!!  No..not now ..already there were a plenty of new terms piercing my cortex. Thankfully my professor had a simple and a straight answer to it “NO. Algorithms are a part of the techniques used in prediction or analysis of the data." 

“KPI  - Key Performance Indicator” was another important term that was under constantly probed during the class. KPIs are used for performance measurement.

And the time was 9 ‘o clock .Great !! I was pretty much awake and still listening to my class lecture. Then there were discussions on Paradigm shift and Web analytics which I’ll be discussing in my next blog. So stay tuned and frequently visit my blog until my next blog shows up.