Description

Currently, Big Data and Business Intelligence are two main economical drivers of our society. Most companies are shifting to a data-driven paradigm where (digital) data gathered is properly stored, managed and exploited in order to extract objective evidences to support their day-by-day decision making processes.

However, such projects are a challenge for any company. On the one hand, these projects may fall into any of these technological challenges:
- The size of data gathered and available in external sources may be huge, which difficults data management (both modeling the database and the data flows nurturing the system) and demands new solutions (e.g., NoSQL and the so-called Big Data paradigm),
- The need to adapt traditional data analysis techniques (e.g, Data Mining techniques) on top of these new data management solutions,
- The difficulty to deal with relatively new technologies with a low degree of maturity, which results in a lack of available off-the-shelf frameworks.

All in all, these projects require to build in-house solutions tailored to the problem to be tackled. As consequence, the IT participants need to show a considerable expertise in data management and data analysis since they cannot benefit from well-established frameworks hidden the communication and coupling complexities between both worlds. For this reason, this course will put into practice all the skills earned by the students during their master studies.

On the other hand, this project acknowledges the relevance of the business side in such project and elaborates on the need to consider business users as first-class citizens during the design and implementation in order to meet their needs. In this sense, Agile Software Development techniques are introduced for the project management. However, the specificities of BI systems do not allow us to directly apply traditional Agile techniques, which need to be adapted for BI.

This course simulates an environment whose conditions are similar to those of a BI industrial project. So that, the students are required to work in a team and undertake a project by planning the project, modeling the BI processes, gathering requirements, analyze and specify a system meeting the project requirements, designing the system and testing, while documenting all the process. Interaction with the business side will be key during the process. Eventually, a prototype is required.