Business schools are good at teaching certain things to students but do not effectively teach students about business intelligence. While that is difficult to do, there are benefits to doing so that may significantly improve the attractiveness of the student to potential employers. Often times, this real-life experience is also more interesting to students and can develop their understanding of the business world. Business intelligence is an important concept to understand and learn how to apply.
More often than not, schools are designed around preparing individuals for tests and not for their careers. Memorization is rewarded while real learning is not. While good memorization skills are always welcome, they do not assist an individual in learning how to be prepared to manage a business through a difficult situation that a business may face.
The best way to teach business intelligence is not through the memorization and application of formulas, but rather through developing an understanding of how a company operates. As such, business intelligence should start with understanding the basic processes that an organization experiences on a regular basis. Start by understanding how companies are financed and what options are available for financing. Next, learn how a company gains revenues and how they source both their labor and products or services. Once you understand how these processes operate you can start to develop an understanding of how the business can make money and satisfactorily complete its objectives.
Once this is understood, a student can learn how an organization identifies target markets and how it attempts to obtain new revenues and control expenses. Making smart decisions that maximize these options for an organization can lead to improved success in the competitive world of business. Learn how businesses expand vertically and horizontally and what options organizations have for using their cash flows. Business planning and intelligence often surrounds how efficiently an organization manages its cash flows, either through internal or external business expansion or through the payment of dividends
Beyond this, business intelligence should involve developing an understanding of internal controls and how an organization transmits information through its accounting system and prepares financial data for analysis. Understanding this allows an individual to understand how fraud is prevented and detected and how reliable financial data is produced. Once this understanding is developed students can be presented with how to analyze this data and what business ratios are important for a business and how an organization should be analyzed. This skill is incredibly useful in the business world and should be essential learning for all business students hoping to gain some basic business intelligence that can benefit their careers.
The business school at Harvard has attempted to teach business intelligence through case studies that are designed around providing real life situations that students can learn from. Executives that make mistakes and smart decisions that organizations make to overcome these mistakes are the highlight of this program.
This is one way to teach business intelligence. There are certainly other methods.
Colleges need to be able to teach students how to learn and develop business intelligence in order for them to have successful business careers. Not just how to memorize and apply business knowledge. These are on the up and up and you need to be aware!