This subject teaches students about the general aspects of the data life cycle and considerations when adopting big data implementations. The notion of business intelligence will be introduced in this subject, while established and open source software will be used to provide students with hands-on experience in the documentation, collection, cleaning, pre-processing, mining and validation of data. Students will evaluate issues related to the automation of operations in a world of big data. Furthermore, students will appreciate the importance of keeping business data up to date across the life of a project.