Applied Business Intelligence in the Making: An Inter-University Case from Swedish Higher Education

Abstract

There has long been a debate regarding the inclusion of IT into the curriculum for business students. With IT being a natural part of their coming working environment, the under-developed use of for instance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions has suffered much critique. As a response to this, the Centre for Business Solutions and the Scandinavian Academic Network for Teaching Enterprise Systems (SANTE) have created a joint initiative together with the industry. Through making the full accounts from a medium-sized manufacturing company available to the students through a specially designed BI solution, the students are given the task to identify potential problems with the accounts. The assignment is intended to be run in the form of a competition, where the students from different Swedish universities compete in analyzing the company in a given time-frame. The purpose of this case is to present the outline and outset for the competition, together with some initial reflections on the setup-phase.