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Welcome to the **Business Intelligence Tools and Techniques** class wiki. Throughout the course, we will work together to create a knowledge repository for use by all of the class's participants.

This wiki is intended to supplement [|Blackboard] rather than replace it. We will use Blackboard for 'official' purposes such as distributing announcements and the syllabus and posting grades. We will use the wiki as a forum for sharing what we have discovered about the the technologies we investigate. It will serve as an interactive repository for our evaluation, thoughts, and comments on how, where, and why these technologies might be useful. It is also a great place for you to post relevant information, articles, web-sites, etc, that you find related to the topics we are covering in the class.

**Course schedule and topics:**
Each topic that we will cover has its own wiki page. Most topics will last for a single class session, though some will extend across two classes. These pages briefly introduce each topic and the preparations you are expected to complete before class. Depending on the topic, these preparations generally include readings, exercises, and/or research.
 * Tuesday 3/18 - Course introduction and overview
 * Thursday 3/20 - Competing on analytics I
 * Tuesday 3/25 - Data Warehousing I
 * Thursday 3/27 - Data Warehousing II
 * Tuesday 4/1 - Competing on analytics II
 * Thursday 4/3 - Reporting tools
 * Tuesday 4/8 - Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
 * Thursday 4/10 - Information visualization
 * Tuesday 4/15 - Data mining
 * Thursday 4/17 - Dashboards
 * Tuesday 4/22 - Continental airlines case study
 * Thursday 4/24 - Real-time BI
 * Tuesday 4/29 - Implementing a BI program: organizational issues and challenges, SYSCO case study
 * Thursday 5/1 - Ethics of Business Intelligence

**Assignments:**
There are three group assignments.
 * Assignment #1
 * Assignment #2
 * Assignment #3

**Syllabus:**
A reference version (1.0) of the syllabus is available here:

**Instructors:**

 * Professor: Bob Monroe, bmonroe@cmu.edu
 * Teaching Assistant: Bao-Jun Jiang, baojunj@andrew.cmu.edu

**Textbooks and Coursepack**:
You will need to purchase two books for the course:
 * [Los03] Loshin, David, Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager’s Guide, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003, ISBN: 1-55860-916-4
 * [DH07] Davenport, Thomas H., and Harris, Jeanne G., Competing on Analytics – The New Science of Winning, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-4221-0332-6

Both books should be available in the CMU bookstore prior to the first class. Links to the books on Amazon.com are listed below.
 * [Los03] http://www.amazon.com/Business-Intelligence-Savvy-Managers-Guides/dp/1558609164/
 * [DH07] http://www.amazon.com/Competing-Analytics-New-Science-Winning/dp/1422103323/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205173887&sr=8-1

In addition to these books, there will be a coursepack available with a selection of readings. The coursepack should be available from the Tepper copy center in the second week of the mini. We won't be using the coursepack until later in the course so don't panic if you find that it isn't available prior to the start of classes.

In addition to the required readings, numerous useful supplementary readings and resources are available in the wiki's library. You are encouraged to add additional readings and resources that you find.

**Ground rules for using the wiki:**
I encourage students to add material to the wiki and edit material on the wiki as appropriate. That said, there are various places on the wiki that I would prefer you not edit such as the topic overviews, class preparations, and assignments. I (Bob Monroe) will try to clearly mark those places that should not be edited (such as this page). I will post all of the 'official' course documents in read-only format on Blackboard. I will also try to make these assignments available on the wiki for everybody's convenience. If the wiki's version and Blackboards version of a document disagree, consider the Blackboard document the definitive copy.