The Business Intelligence (BI) specialization builds analytical, managerial and baseline technical skills to help you learn to manage the process of transforming data into business insights. The MSIM program provides pathways to ensure students from all technical backgrounds are able to succeed in this specialization. Students often pair this specialization with Data Science, User Experience, Program/Product Management & Consulting, or Information Architecture.

This specialization has a managerial/strategic focus but also incorporates modern analytics and data warehousing toolsets to provide foundational exposure to key technologies.

Availability: Online; Residential, daytime and evening classes

Skills you will develop

• Derive insights from data by building analytical, managerial and baseline technical skills.
• Design, implement and leverage business intelligence systems from a managerial and strategic lens.
• Develop relational database and SQL knowledge and be exposed to key concepts, such as dimensional data modeling; extracting, transforming and loading data (ETL); machine learning; online analytical processing (OLAP); data warehouse architecture.
• Develop data visualizations for strategic management.

“[Business Intelligence] also gives me the tools to analyze data and find insights that could be lost without a technical understanding of the information available.”

— Julieta Sanchez, ‘17

Elective courses in the Business Intelligence specialization

This specialization consists of three courses on business intelligence and data science that will help you hone your skills across key concepts, systems and technical tools through a managerial lens. 

Learn more about the core, elective and Capstone/practicum courses in the UW MSIM curriculum. 

• IMT 572 Introduction to Data Science (4 credits) Provides a high-level introduction to common data science pipelines, such as experimental design, data collection and storage, basic analytics, machine learning, and data visualization, focusing on analyzing in real-world datasets using industry standard statistical packages.
• IMT 576 Foundations of Strategic and Managerial Business Intelligence (4 credits) Provides a broad overview of business intelligence (BI) including foundational BI concepts, strategies, techniques, and technologies.
• IMT 577 Business Intelligence Systems (4 credits) Introduces fundamentals of how to architect and develop business intelligence systems for decision making. Topics include dimensional data modeling; extracting, transforming, and loading data (ETL); online analytical processing (OLAP); data warehouse architecture; developing data visualizations to answer key business questions.

Career outcomes

Students who specialize in business intelligence frequently find roles with titles including business analyst, business development consultant, market research analyst, program manager, software engineer, and solutions engineer.