Preparing for Business Intelligence Class

In a few short weeks I will begin teaching an undergraduate course in business intelligence.  Business intelligence (aka BI) and the corresponding topics within the field have been around for while but under different names.  With the new language and concepts I was unsure my knowledge of legacy concepts and implementations were still valid so I began preparing for the class by searching for introduction-level articles on the BI field.

I was immediately successful in locating a great introductory source.  The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional organization in the IT field, put together what they refer to as Tech Packs as a form of overview for a select group of topics.  In the library of Tech Packs I found a Tech Pack for BI.  This set of overviews and annotated bibliographies provided a great introduction to the BI field and included many references for further reading.  Using this Tech Pack I was able to confirm my understanding of the topics and now feel I have a good solid foundation to begin working with my textbooks to teach the course.

I still have a lot to do to prepare for the course and a lot of learning along the way.  Since this is my first iteration with this new course it will be a JIT (just-in-time) design and development over the semester.  I'm looking forward to the challenge of the course and the excitement to be learning more about BI.