Business Intelligence in College: A Teaching Case with Real Life Puzzles

Modern Business Intelligence (BI) is about the process of turning data into actionable information, using an assortment of tools, techniques, and applications. Although BI, or its predecessor Decision Support Systems (DSS), has been applied in the industry for about half a century, it has only recently been taught in business schools. In the report “State of Business Intelligence in Academia 2010” Wixom and Ariyachandra found that the discipline faces many challenges in its way from practice to academia. For the lecturer, challenges include access to data sets and finding suitable cases, as well as providing realistic and meaningful examples. For the students, on the other hand, the problem is that BI is ripe with concepts and acronyms and appears too theoretical and abstract.