MISY 5370 – MIDTERM.
Built around real course units and objectives!
First development - Answer: technological advances, social networks and data generated
from personal electronic devices produce incredible data
Second development - Answer: • Advances in computational approaches to effectively
handle and explore massive amounts of data
• Faster algorithms for optimization and simulation, and
• More effective approaches for visualizing data
Third development - Answer: • The methodological developments were paired with an
explosion in computing power and storage capability.
• Better computing hardware, parallel computing, and cloud computing have enabled
businesses to solve big problems faster and more accurately than ever before.
Strategic Decision - Answer: •Involve higher-level issues concerned with the overall
direction of the organization.
•These decisions define the organization's overall goals and aspirations for the future.
Tactical decision - Answer: •Concern how the organization should achieve the goals and
objectives set by its strategy.
•They are usually the responsibility of midlevel management.
Operational Decision - Answer: •Affect how the firm is run from day-to-day.
•They are the domain of operations managers, who are the closest to the customer.
Decision making can be defined as the following process - Answer: 1. Identify and define
the problem
2. Determine the criteria that will be used to evaluate alternative solutions
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
1
,3. Determine the set of alternative solutions
4. Evaluate the alternatives
5. Choose an alternative
Common approaches to making decisions - Answer: •Tradition
•Intuition
•Rules of thumb
•Using the relevant data available
Business Analytics - Answer: •Scientific process of transforming data into insight for
making better decisions.
•Used for data-driven or fact-based decision making, which is often seen as more objective
than other alternatives for decision making.
Tools of business analytics can aid decision making by: - Answer: •Creating insights from
data
•Improving our ability to more accurately forecast for planning
•Helping us quantify risk
•Yielding better alternatives through analysis and optimization
Descriptive analytics - Answer: analytical tools that describe what has happened
Examples - data queries, reports, descriptive statistics, data visualization (data
dashboards), data-mining techniques, and basic what-if spreadsheet models.
Data query - Answer: a request for information with certain characteristics from a database
Data dashboards - Answer: • collections of tables, charts, maps and summary statistics
that are updated as new data become available
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
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, Uses of dashboards - Answer: •To help management monitor specific aspects of the
company's performance related to their decision-making responsibilities.
•For corporate-level managers, daily data dashboards might summarize sales by region,
current inventory levels, and other company-wide metrics.
•Front-line managers may view dashboards that contain metrics related to staffing levels,
local inventory levels, and short-term sales forecasts.
Predictive analytics - Answer: techniques that use models constructed from past data to
predict the future or to ascertain the impact of one variable on another
Data mining - Answer: techniques used to find patterns or relationships among elements of
the data in a large database
Simulation - Answer: the use of probability and statistics to construct a computer model to
study the impact of uncertainty on the decision at hand
Prescriptive analytics - Answer: techniques that take input data and yield a best course of
action
Optimization model - Answer: a mathematical model that gives the best decision, subject
to the simulation's constraints
Simulation optimization - Answer: Combines the use of probability and statistics to model
uncertainty with optimization techniques to find good decisions in highly complex and
highly uncertain settings.
Decision analysis - Answer: •Used to develop an optimal strategy when a decision-maker is
faced with several decision alternatives and an uncertain set of future events.
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
3
Built around real course units and objectives!
First development - Answer: technological advances, social networks and data generated
from personal electronic devices produce incredible data
Second development - Answer: • Advances in computational approaches to effectively
handle and explore massive amounts of data
• Faster algorithms for optimization and simulation, and
• More effective approaches for visualizing data
Third development - Answer: • The methodological developments were paired with an
explosion in computing power and storage capability.
• Better computing hardware, parallel computing, and cloud computing have enabled
businesses to solve big problems faster and more accurately than ever before.
Strategic Decision - Answer: •Involve higher-level issues concerned with the overall
direction of the organization.
•These decisions define the organization's overall goals and aspirations for the future.
Tactical decision - Answer: •Concern how the organization should achieve the goals and
objectives set by its strategy.
•They are usually the responsibility of midlevel management.
Operational Decision - Answer: •Affect how the firm is run from day-to-day.
•They are the domain of operations managers, who are the closest to the customer.
Decision making can be defined as the following process - Answer: 1. Identify and define
the problem
2. Determine the criteria that will be used to evaluate alternative solutions
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
1
,3. Determine the set of alternative solutions
4. Evaluate the alternatives
5. Choose an alternative
Common approaches to making decisions - Answer: •Tradition
•Intuition
•Rules of thumb
•Using the relevant data available
Business Analytics - Answer: •Scientific process of transforming data into insight for
making better decisions.
•Used for data-driven or fact-based decision making, which is often seen as more objective
than other alternatives for decision making.
Tools of business analytics can aid decision making by: - Answer: •Creating insights from
data
•Improving our ability to more accurately forecast for planning
•Helping us quantify risk
•Yielding better alternatives through analysis and optimization
Descriptive analytics - Answer: analytical tools that describe what has happened
Examples - data queries, reports, descriptive statistics, data visualization (data
dashboards), data-mining techniques, and basic what-if spreadsheet models.
Data query - Answer: a request for information with certain characteristics from a database
Data dashboards - Answer: • collections of tables, charts, maps and summary statistics
that are updated as new data become available
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
2
, Uses of dashboards - Answer: •To help management monitor specific aspects of the
company's performance related to their decision-making responsibilities.
•For corporate-level managers, daily data dashboards might summarize sales by region,
current inventory levels, and other company-wide metrics.
•Front-line managers may view dashboards that contain metrics related to staffing levels,
local inventory levels, and short-term sales forecasts.
Predictive analytics - Answer: techniques that use models constructed from past data to
predict the future or to ascertain the impact of one variable on another
Data mining - Answer: techniques used to find patterns or relationships among elements of
the data in a large database
Simulation - Answer: the use of probability and statistics to construct a computer model to
study the impact of uncertainty on the decision at hand
Prescriptive analytics - Answer: techniques that take input data and yield a best course of
action
Optimization model - Answer: a mathematical model that gives the best decision, subject
to the simulation's constraints
Simulation optimization - Answer: Combines the use of probability and statistics to model
uncertainty with optimization techniques to find good decisions in highly complex and
highly uncertain settings.
Decision analysis - Answer: •Used to develop an optimal strategy when a decision-maker is
faced with several decision alternatives and an uncertain set of future events.
APPHIA – Crafted with Care and Precision for Academic Excellence.
3
