Graduate Business Intelligence Certificate Program

The competitive environment faced by most businesses today is characterized by enormous risks, rapid and unpredictable change, and yet unprecedented opportunities. Compounding these complexities is a virtual flood of data that must be managed and utilized on a daily basis. In order to cope in this environment and even thrive in it, organizations of all types need to develop superior intelligence capabilities. “Business intelligence” must be generated and exploited at all levels, from the operational frontline to the boardroom.

The Business Intelligence Graduate Certificate Program at the Cox School of Business can help DFW Metroplex companies and organizations achieve superior business intelligence resources. The program empowers business managers and business analysts with an understanding of powerful analytical tools that are commonly available, so that they can leverage their information resources to make better decisions.

The program is comprehensive and thorough. The three modules making up the program address three key areas of interest: traditional analytical models for decision support, implemented on widely available spreadsheet platforms; tools to leverage databases and large datasets for business intelligence; and organizational resources and initiatives that can facilitate and enhance business intelligence.


Who Should Attend

This program is intended for any manager, market researcher or business analyst who needs to analyze business data using such analytical decision tools as statistics, discrete optimization, simulation, database manipulation, data mining and knowledge management.


Program Highlights

Covers contemporary modeling methods that leverage the large databases and datasets available to organizations today.

Combines understanding of modeling methods and concepts with hands-on use of modeling using popular software tools such as spreadsheet and DBMS packages.

Designed to suit the working professional, with three-hour sessions conveniently scheduled at the Cox School of Business on the SMU campus in Dallas.

Taught primarily by leading experts on the Cox School of Business faculty, along with selected experts from both academia and industry.


Program Schedule

Module I: Decision Modeling and Analysis
- Statistical Modeling I
Estimation
Confidence Intervals and their use
Hypothesis testing

- Statistical Modeling II
Data visualization
Setting up models
Correlations and analysis of variance

- Statistical Modeling III
Regression models
Forecasting models

- Decision Modeling I
Setting up optimization models
Linear Programming

- Decision Modeling II
Goal Programming
Queuing models and logistics modeling

- Decision Modeling III
Process Analysis

Module 2: Data and Knowledge Management

- Data Management and DBMS
Creating and manipulating databases
Working with databases in Client-server environments

- Integrating Databases with Spreadsheet Modeling

- Data Warehousing/OLAP
Why data warehouses?
Working with data warehouses
OLAP systems

- Knowledge Management
Benefits of knowledge management
Approaches to knowledge management
Tools for knowledge management

Module 3: Leveraging Organizational Knowledge

- Data Mining I
Types of data mining models
Setting up data mining projects
Data preparation
- Data Mining II
Clustering
Neural Networks
Decision Trees for classification

- Data Mining III
Rule-based systems
Association Rules
Web data mining

- Customer Relationship Management I
Overview of CRM/PRM systems

- Customer Relationship Management II
Analyzing market segments