Why B-Schools Should Teach Business Intelligence

To succeed in business, one needs to be smart—really smart—but business intelligence (BI) is not measured by college degrees. BI is about quickly making sense of the vast amounts of data collected about all dimensions of a business, and then making sound decisions that will generate value for the company. For business schools, it’s also a big opportunity, one that is, by and large, being missed.

Given how much data is generated from information technology (think Big Data), it is easy to become overwhelmed by all that is collected about customers and employees, suppliers, competitors, and product inventory. Data warehouses can become treasure chests of information leading to competitive advantage, but only if one knows how to properly mine the data. Sophisticated technologies and skills are needed to process data, find patterns and relations, develop insights from past transactions, and make predictions.