Business Technologies

Overview/Introduction

The specialisation module Business Technologies (BT) deals with a highly topical issue. (Information) Technology is an integral part of any business activity. The use of IT alone, however, does not provide a competitive advantage. The challenges of the future are no longer restricted to aligning IT to the requirements of a business, but they will lie in interconnecting businesses and IT in order to make new business models possible, increase financial and operative efficiency of a business as well as being able to react to changed requirements quickly and efficiently. Therefore, the focus is on the necessity to make existing process- and IT-architectures (Enterprise Architectures, EA) flexible, so a business is able to swiftly react to changes, prepare relevant data in the best possible way to make them accessible for efficient analyses in the context of data science. In the specialisation module Business Technologies, you learn basic technologies and the management approaches behind them to understand, apply and implement this new paradigm.

Specialisation 1: Business Intelligence & Data Science

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Frank-Michael Schleif

Description

Business Intelligence (BI) means the business-internal process to create useful information for individual decision makers from the data available. In this, BI addresses the decision maker on the planning level as well as those in the top management level. 
Today, business intelligence is a key technology no company can work without,
since only those who have the right key figures available for corporate management can survive in competition.

Business intelligence uses algorithms and models which are also used in other fields of data science. The technological basis for BI often is a data warehouse (DWH).

A DWH is a database, integrating and preparing data from operative corporate systems as well as external sources for analytic evaluations. In contrast to other corporate information systems, not an individual business process is the focus, but providing a holistic perspective on the business to the management. The data supply, data management and evaluation is both professionally and technically highly demanding. The reasons for this are the many different data sources, the high data volume (often in the multi-digit terabyte range) and the management-compatible preparation and presentation of the information.

The BI course introduces tools and methods that are useful to design, implement and operate BI systems.

Contents

  • Clarification of concepts
  • Business application scenarios
  • Basics of data warehousing
  • Requirements analysis for BI systems
  • Creation of a dimensional model
  • Infrastructure for BI systems
  • Data warehouse architecture and database design
  • Data management (ETL - extract, transform, load)
  • Multidimensional analysis (Online Analytical Processing, OLAP)
  • Data Science algorithms and methods
  • Information visualisation and Visual Analytics

Learning Outcomes

  • Understanding the importance of business intelligence in companies.
  • Ability to classify typical application scenarios
  • Knowledge about methodologies to develop BI systems
  • Business intelligence process
  • Understanding the general functioning of BI tools
  • Practical experience in analysis, data modelling and implementing BI systems by using selected BI tools
  • Knowledge about limitations and possibilities of data analysis
  • Understanding BI specific algorithms for data analysis
  • Fundamental qualification for executing BI projects

Specialisation Seminar

Description

During the specialisation seminar, you will deal with current BT topics independently and contribute written papers and presentations. In this, the focus is on practical, methodical and scientific working techniques as well as current topics that have to be dealt with in-depth.

This makes the complex interrelations of business technology management (BTM) transparent to all seminar participants as well as it intensively trains the ability to analyse, present and reproduce contents.

Specialisation 2: Business Process Management

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Saueressig

Description

Business processes are the core of any corporate activity. The compilation of personnel and the way corporate processes are organised make each company unique. Business processes are therefore an essential component of any competitive advantage. In most companies, business process are now mapped in IT or are supported by IT. This connection of IT and processes has become more important in recent years.

By business process management (BTM) an integrated concept is meant that takes into account all the stages of the business process development from the systematic creation, management and control, but also the further development of business processes. Thus, BPM comprises the strategic process management as well as process design, implementation and controlling.

The focus of IT-supported business process management is on the networking and technical integration of all processes and services - throughout and across companies. In order to meet the associated requirements for flexibility, interoperability and performance, new approaches as well as supporting tools and architectures are needed. Integrated business process management systems (BPMS) are one such approach. The prerequisite for implementing BPMS is an IT-architecture which enables an integration (e.g. service-oriented architectures - SOA).

Contents

  • Clarification of concepts and classification of business process management
  • Strategic BPM:
    • Connection between corporate goals, strategy and processes
    • Strategic BPM approaches:
    • Maturity models
    • Process Mining
  • Operational BPM:
    • Process organisation
    • Process controlling
    • Corporate architectures for BPM
    • Systems supporting process management
  • Applying a BPMS (case study)

Learning Outcomes

  • Understanding the fundamental paradigm of BPM
  • Understanding the relation between strategic and operational BPM
  • Getting an insight in the importance of strategic process management
  • Knowledge of BPM Standards and languages of process description
  • Recognizing the relevance of process controlling
  • Knowledge of IT-architectures relevant to BPM
  • Knowledge of the functionalities of BPM systems

Requirements

  • Programme-specific: Module Business Technologies (4th semester)
  • Only for students specialising in Business Technologies

Suitable core electives (FWPM)

Intelligent Data Analysis

This (blended learning) course teaches essential knowledge in the context of Data Science. Participants learn the basics and algorithms for data analysis. We will talk about the risks and potentials of Data Science applications and develop small prototypical solutions with the help of RapidMiner (a Data Science tool).

The course will cover the following topics:

  • Opportunities, limitations and risks of data analysis and/or Data Science.
  • Mathematical basics
  • Data pre-processing and purification
  • Models, model creation, evaluation methods
  • Unsupervised and supervised learning
  • Data visualisation

Additional Information

Our BIX.lab (Lab for Business Information Excellence) is available for students specialising in BT as well as for those writing their final theses.