What to think about when coming up with a BI startup idea

Recently, I did the exercise of creating a business plan, following the single requirement that the business should be focused on Business Intelligence (BI). Almost all businesses nowadays are data driven, i.e. they incorporate some form of BI to drive the company decisions. However, the restriction for us was that our businesses had to deliver information, not only use it internally.

Now, even though I have been working in the area of BI for the past two years, coming up with a business idea from scratch was not an easy task. In this post I will share with you some of the learning outcomes of this experience, so that if you desire to start up your own BI focused business, you can benefit from what we learned.

IT4BI FAQ

I quite often receive questions about the IT4BI program: my CV is on the program's website, and people see my email there and write me. Also, I get quite a lot of questions from social networks. I usually try my best to give answers to all of them, but many questions repeat again and again, so it's a good idea to create a FAQ and make the answers are available to everybody, so I don't have to repeat myself. A fairly large part of the questions are about the admission process, and I already addressed some of them in IT4BI: How To.

IT4BI: How To

In the post European Master Programs in Data Analysis I listed some Master programs that I myself applied to. There I also briefly outlined how to apply to them. In this post, I would like to give more details about the process of applying to the program of my choice: Erasmus Mundus IT4BI. This is mostly based on my experience and I would like to share this with you.

Additionally, I sometimes get questions by email about the program and quite a lot of them are about the process: documents, motivation letters, etc. In this post I will also address these questions, and spare myself the troubles of typing the same text over and over again :)

European Master Programs in Data Analysis

Some time ago, in 2012, I decided that I wanted to continue my education and get a Master's Degree. I wanted to get more involved into data analysis and related things like machine learning or data mining. Secondly, this had to be a program in Europe because I didn't want to travel too far - back then I lived in Poland. And lastly, I wanted to find a program with both tuition waivers and monthly allowances to cover living expenses.

I started actively looking for programs that met these criteria and now I would like to share my experience. In this blog post I list the most interesting programs (to me) and I include only ones that I myself applied to. I will not describe the programs/scholarships in details, but instead will refer to links with information. However I will add some things that I think are important: e.g. the process of applying, interesting details, etc.

IT4BI: Distributed and Large-Scale Business Intelligence

The first semester of the second year is devoted to specialization, and there are 3 possible choices in the IT4BI program. One of them is "Distributed and Large-Scale Business Intelligence" and it is delivered by the DIMA group at the Technical University of Berlin. It is the specialization of my choice, so I'm happy to share my experience about it in this post.