ICIT440 Final Exam Study Guide

The final exam will have 50 questions (1/2 point each), composed of true/false, multiple choice,
and term-to-statement matching. It covers sessions 1 6. The questions are based on concepts covered in
the lecture slides and on homework. This study guide gives you a pretty good idea of what will be covered by
the exam. The session review slides are also useful.
Exam Notes: You will be allowed (but not required) to have a single 8.5 by 11 page of
handwritten notes to use in the exam. The notes must be in your own handwriting. You can use both sides of
the page. The notes page must have your name on it. I will examine your notes page when passing out the
exam. You will turn in the notes page with your exam.

Terms
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business intelligence (BI)

automated decision system (ADS)
business analytics
GIS
OLTP (online transaction processing)
data warehouse
enterprise data warehouse
operational data store (ODS)
big data
data mart
metadata
coordinated metadata
Independent data marts
dependent data mart
virtual / federated data warehouse
hub and spoke data marts
hub and spoke data warehouse
enterprise data warehouse
ETL (extract, translate, load)
Real-time BI
star schema
snowflake schema
fact table
dimension
dimension hierarchy
level of granularity
drill-down

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conformed dimensions
multidimensional analysis
MOLAP
ROLAP
business performance management
(BPM)
strategic objectives and goals
operational plan (tactics)
CSFs (critical success factors)
KPIs (key performance indicators)
gap analysis
variance analysis
balanced scorecard
Six Sigma
Lean
Capability Maturity Model
ITIL (Information Technology
Infrastructure Library)
strategy map
data mining
predictive accuracy
classification
clustering
association
sequence discovery
estimation
text mining
web mining

Things to understand
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The four steps in the BI activity cycle

Understand why agile development approach suits BI projects better than traditional waterfall
approach.
(From Howsons survey) Recognize the importance of sponsorship factors on the likelihood of
success for a BI project.
The differences in design goals and usage between OLTP operational databases and data
warehouse databases
The role of IT experts with regard to different parts of the BI framework
Role of the business intelligence competency center
Role of the business intelligence steering committee
The 4 main descriptive qualities of data in the definition of the data warehouse
The purpose of each of the possible components of the data warehouse (ODS, metadata, data
mart, enterprise data warehouse)
The main characteristics of the five data warehouse architecture options
Types of source data problems
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ICIT440 Business Intelligence Fundamentals

ICIT440 Final Exam Study Guide

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The reason source data analysis is done early in the requirements analysis for a BI project
The role of the data architecture group in reviewing project data models in the iterative
construction of the enterprise data architecture
Why businesses are looking at integrating collaboration tools with BI
The justification for and difficulty with real-time data warehousing
The types of questions that the different types of analytic tools are best suited to answer
The basic strengths of common charting methods bar / column chart, line / area chart,
histogram, scatter diagram, pie chart
What can be learned from clickstream data analysis
Qualities of good sets of performance measures
Guidelines for display of key performance indicators and metrics on dashboards
How a sample is used in data mining for training (creating) and testing a predictive model
The three types ethical issues that Seltzer discusses regarding the use of data mining

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ICIT440 Business Intelligence Fundamentals