TDWI Buisness Intelligence Fundamentals: From Data Warehousing to Business Impact

This second course is an introductory course and spoke of these subjects at a conceptual level with no "nitty-gritty" detail. It was comprised of five modules, "Introduction to Business Intelligence", "Business Application Fundamentals", "BI Architecture and Process", "BI Infrastructure", and "Summary and Conclusions".

The "Introduction" module (Module 1) is brief and describes some of the different technology and business solutions in BI (DSS, EIS, OLAP, Supply Chain Analysis, Customer Analysis, etc). It also discusses the OBI framework as it regards to the Organizational roles and responsibilities.

The "Business Application" module (Module 2) covers the topics of business requirements, value, impact, applications, and analytics. It describes how and in what different ways BI can make an impact on business from the importance of business drivers through dash boards and score cards.

The "BI Architecture and Process" module (Module 3) covers the topics of warehousing definitions, warehousing data stores, data warehousing architectures, data warehousing processes, and business intelligence processes. The definitions section covers the definitions of the keywords included in the definition of a data warehouse (integrated, subject-oriented, time-variant, non-volatile, and accessible). The data stores sections covers the types and roles of the differnet collections of data (source, stage, ODS, warehouse, data mart). The data architecture section covers independent data marts, conformed data marts, hub and spoke versus bus, transient versus persistent versus semi-persistent staging, ODS positioning, and ETL. The business processes sections covers data access and delivery.

The "BI Infrastructure" module (Module 4) is really the meat of the course and covers the topics of BI infrastructure and BI readiness briefly while discussing the BI processes, technology, and roles and responsibilities in depth. In the processes section, the course discusses program management, change management, quality management, data governance, depolyment methodologies, project management, data warehouse administration, and metadata management. In the technology section, the course does not list all the different names of technologies, but it does provide the knowledge that tools are available to handle warehouse capactiy planning and other administration/operations tasks, data integration, etc. The BI roles and responsibilities section covers a fairly exhaustive list of business roles and what portion of the BI program/project for which they are responsible.

The "Summary" module (Module 5) has a list of top ten mistakes by job, a best practices list, and a list of references and resources.

Take aways:
While this course covered much of what TDWI Data Warehousing Concepts and Principles: An Introduction to the Field of Data Warehousing covered in the first three modules, the fourth module really took that knowledge to the BI level from the data warehouse level. It also seemed to try to stress the business impact the BI program has.
Concepts like change management, data governance and metadata strategies.