Data Management Tools for Business Decisions

3 units

This course prepares students for success in many business analyst roles. The tools covered in this course will prepare students well for roles in finance, accounting, quantitative marketing, information systems, operations, talent analytics, and others. As companies collect more data internally and augment this with external data sources, collecting, maintaining, and organizing data is becoming an essential skill for success in many roles. Developing creative reports and dashboards that are updated in real time are demanded in today's data-driven decision-making environment. While there are a plethora of tools available to support business analysts, this course focuses on VBA in Excel and SQL, two critical tools for reporting and dashboards. Students will also be introduced to Tableau, the state-of-the-art visualization software. These tools are introduced within the broader organizational data environment to provide an understanding of the role of the business analyst within the organization. Companies' data environments traditionally include enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, relational databases, external data sources, data warehouses, and data cubes. Understanding the roles of each component of the data environment enables students to utilize each effectively.