To successfully compete in today’s global business environment an organization must constantly monitor, recognize and understand every aspect and every issue of its operations, its industry and the overall business environment. This course focuses on business analytics - an information technology approach to data collection and data analysis - to support a wide variety of management tasks, from performance evaluation to trend spotting and policy making. Students learn analytical components and technologies used to create dashboards and scorecards, data/text/Web mining methods for trend and sentiment analysis, and artificial intelligence techniques used to develop intelligent systems for decision support. Students will actively participate in this course through class discussions, project preparation and presentation, and visual tool utilization.