Business Intelligence and Analytics (Applied) MSc

Real-world experience is essential for standing out in today’s competitive job market. Our Advanced Practice module offers you the opportunity to apply your academic knowledge in a practical setting, enhancing both your employability and professional skill set.

This module, typically undertaken over one semester, prepares you for practice-based opportunities that align with your career aspirations. You’ll receive tailored support and guidance to apply for a range of advanced practice experiences, including:

• research or project-based opportunities on campus or virtually
• employer-led, work-based opportunities on campus or virtually
• internships with external organisations to gain offsite industry experience.

You’ll engage in an advanced practice opportunity that complements your skill set and future goals. Assessment is through a reflective evaluation, equivalent to 3,000 words, marked on a pass/fail basis. Although this module does not contribute to your overall degree classification, it provides invaluable hands-on experience that prepares you to excel in your career.

Develop your ability to design and implement databases, big data and analytics applications to meet business needs. Use case studies to follow the system development life cycle, developing a plausible application, from inception to implementation for a real-world scenario. Investigate the issues and technologies associated with implementing and supporting large-scale databases, and the services needed to maintain and access a data repository. Focus on big data, data warehouses, legacy data integration, data management, and approaches supporting the modelling and visualisation of data for various uses.

Develop a piece of work that brings together key elements of your learning. Demonstrate the knowledge you have acquired, an understanding of practice and its application in a professional context.

You choose the unique composition, content and context of your project, demonstrating reflective practice with a commitment to continual learning and development.

Gain a deep understanding of real-world organisational challenges and how to develop effective solutions. Become a proficient planner who can execute in-depth research in business and management. Through a blend of quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques, you dissect data to propose standardised solutions to intricate industrial issues, and finish with a professional report presentation.

Decision-making involves selecting a course of action from multiple alternatives, and can impact individual and organisational performance. Business intelligence tools provide managers and leaders with detailed information about an organisation’s current, past, and sometimes future, state to facilitate faster business decision-making. You are introduced to the techniques available for analysing large datasets and interpreting patterns and trends, so you can extract meaningful insights that aid effective decision-making.

As the global business environment becomes ever more complex and volatile, there is a need for organisations of all shapes and sizes to think and act more entrepreneurially, innovatively and creatively in order to be able to change and adapt. This interdisciplinary module provides you with an understanding of the internal and external factors that impact strategic decision-making. You are introduced to a variety of strategic theories, tools and concepts, all in the context of the external environment and its impact on strategic challenges and choices. You are exposed to a variety of academic and practical material that you apply to your own organisation, or a live-case organisation, in order to appreciate the importance of developing and implementing innovative strategic plans for the success of the organisation, its key stakeholders and society more broadly.

Explore the power of interactive visualisation to uncover insights within complex, multi-dimensional datasets. Unlike static visuals, interactive graphics allow you to zoom, filter and drill down into data, providing both macro and micro perspectives. Using JavaScript libraries like D3.js, you learn to create dynamic, web-based visualisations that enhance user engagement. You also develop skills in dashboard design, tool generation and understanding how users interact with data.