Business Intelligence Master’s Degrees

Broadly speaking, business intelligence (BI) is the extraction of insights from raw data to aid in business decision making. BI has traditionally involved cataloging and examining data from past actions, and developing a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning.

Today, business intelligence analysts leverage a variety of technologies, processes, and software to identify, extract, combine, and analyze the abundance of data that is produced by—and can inform—day-to-day business. Functions of BI technologies may include development of dashboards, online analytical processing, data mining, querying, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and reporting.

A degree in business intelligence will help you with the technological and decision-science knowhow to improve business decision making.

Business Intelligence versus Business Analytics

The distinction between business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) is neither clear cut nor agreed upon. The fields of study are related enough that some programs combine the two, offering degrees or concentrations in “Business Intelligence and Analytics.”

Still, it’s helpful to have some idea of the difference. BI looks to the past, basing business strategies on insights gleaned from historical data. BI answers questions such as “what happened,” “how many,” and “how often.”

BA, in contrast, uses modeling techniques to predict future events, tackling questions such as “why is this happening,” “what if these trends continue,” “what will happen next,” and “what is the best that can happen.”

Courses

BI (and BI/BA) programs typically require students to complete a handful of core courses and then fill out their schedule with electives. Common courses include:

• Data Mining
• Data Warehouse Design and Implementation
• Decision Support Systems
• Database Tools
• Balanced Scorecards and Performance Dashboards
• Predictive Analytics
• Data Pre-Processing and Exploration

Many BI programs require applicants to have a bachelor’s degree in science, mathematics, computer science, engineering, or a related field.

New Developments

The increasing demand for self-service data visualization and business discovery tools reflects the influx of data-savvy knowledge workers equipped to dig into the data themselves rather than enlisting an IT intermediary. Bypassing the IT department may save time, but it also means that analysis becomes less centralized. As the popularity of self-service BI tools grows, industry leaders are likely asking: Does the analytics empowerment and reduced time-to-answer afforded by these tools come at the expense of cost control and data quality management? Is the trade-off worth it?

For more on Business Intelligence trends, see Tableau Software’s list.

School Listings

We found 16 universities in our directory offering Business Intelligence programs.

If you represent a university and would like to contact us about editing any of our listings, or adding new programs, please send an email to info@mastersindatascience.org.

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