Interest in business intelligence has been a recent strong theme among employers of our graduate students and among our distance students. Medium and large-sized businesses are especially interested. In order to make appropriate decisions, upper-level administration of an organization needs to draw the data together from different systems in order to get a crisper picture of the status and performance of an organization and present it in helpful ways. Examples include the development of organizational scorecards, dashboards and other tools that provide a picture of how an organization is performing. People capable of creating and maintaining such information are needed, but the in-depth education necessary for these people is available in only a few places.

The graduate certificate in business intelligence focuses on the technologies that allow an organization to make effective business decisions based on operational data pulled together from many different sources inside an organization. The target audience consists of any individual who would manage any type of IT professionals, database administrators, business analysts, and any person who would need to understand the technologies behind the capabilities of those technologies.