MIS 304 CHAPTER 6 Enhancing Business Intelligence Using Information Systems Exam 2023

Explain business intelligence (BI) - Answer- Business intelligence or Analytics involves taking raw data as input and generating reports or analyses that support decisions of the organization. To be successful, organizations must have up-to-date, accurate and integrated information to monitor and fine-tune a broad range of business processes. why do companies use business intelligence - Answer- to make better business decsions!! Companies use business intelligence and analytics to stay ahead of competitors. Suppose you wanted to know which customers are most likely to buy a new high-tech but expensive product? To answer this, you may analyze data about customers, orders, payment history, inventory and advertising. Your Information Systems will collect and analyze data for effective management. Data-driven organizations make decisions backed up by verifiable data, and such organizations have been shown to be measurably more productive and profitable than those that don't. explain the difference between business intelligence and analytics - Answer- Business intelligence is often regarded as looking at or analyzing the past to understand what happened. While the analytics side can be thought of as using this past data and trends to try and extrapolate or predict something in the future. The term "business analytics" can be thought of as the broad term that encompasses both the past analyses and future predictions. What are the sources of business intelligence (BI) data? - Answer- The raw data for BI may come from multiple sources including operational databases within the company or external databases from partner organizations or even third parties. The raw data may be structured or unstructured or hybrid. You may work with spreadsheets, news reports, or articles and posts on social media. what types of questions do you answer with business intelligence data? - Answer- *You have a choice between running multiple marketing promotions. Which one is likely to be most effective? *Or you may want to know which customers are most likely to switch to a competitor if you raise prices by 10%? And do you care if those customers switch? How does it impact long-term profitability? (you will not only want to use your operational database with customers, costs, sales and profitability data, but you may also wish to combine this with feedback from customers, news articles, or sentiment analysis from social media. ) explain the users of business intelligence and advanced analytics - Answer- The need for business intelligence and advanced analytics goes beyond traditional businesses; all types of organizations utilize it to improve their data-driven decision making as seen in the examples below (-political parties, government, defense, hospitals, nonprofit) What are the external factors of BI (threats and opportunities) - Answer- (BI can help organizations make better decisions in the increasingly complex, fast-changing, and competitive environment by more effectively collecting and analyzing both external and internal data.) such as changes in consumer demand, competitive pressures, and changing regulations, can create both threats and opportunities businesses need to respond to. The more rapidly businesses can recognize changes and move to account for them, the more competitive they will be in today's ever-changing business environment. Explain big data - Answer- High Volume: Unprecedented amounts of data High Variety: Structured data and Unstructured data High Velocity: Rapid processing to maximize value companies use BI to understand this rapidly explain continous planning in BI - Answer- This requires continuous monitoring to ensure organizations have the information to make ongoing, forward-looking adjustments and updates to business plans. Business Intelligence helps organizations to continuously and quickly monitor and analyze data, and make adjustments to the business plans. Explain how databases input into BI applications - Answer- If you have a good database, you can effectively manage the data about what products a customer bought or viewed, or the comments they wrote so that you can analyze sales trends, customer satisfaction, and other key performance indicators of company health. This is how databases power business intelligence systems. what is a database - Answer- Databases are collections of related data organized in a way that facilitates data entry and searches. data base example - Answer- One of the key advantages of databases are their ability to effectively link related data. *For example, we store customers data in a table or orders data or products data. * A key feature of the database is seen because by design we link CUSTOMERS to ORDERS * This link gets embedded in the table * So that when we run a query we can find out for each customer, what ORDERS they placed. What products were on the order, and how much was paid and what discount was received. And further, we can track the employee or salesperson involved and how the order was shipped and when it reached. Putting a query like this together without a database would take hours or days. With a database, the answer can be quickly put together in a matter of minutes. explain a database layout - Answer- * A database is made up of a number of related tables. For example you may store data on customers, orders, products, and shippers, all in your sales database. * Each table contains data on a specific theme, for example customers A table is made up of a number rows or records. Each row is made up of a series of attributes or columns what are the elements of a database - Answer- Table: Contains data about entities (i.e., the "thing" or object about which you want to track data, e.g., customers). Consists of rows and columns. Row (record): A record in a table. One row pertains to one entity instance. Column (attribute): One cell in a row. Each attribute contains a piece of information about the entity. Explain database tables and records - Answer- Suppose we had a table for STUDENTS or CUSTOMERS. * Each table has a number of rows also known as records or tuples * A row has a number of attributes or columns. To be precise, an attribute refers to the entire column. *At the intersection of each row and column, you have a specific value *A table will also have an identifier or primary key. This is the attribute that is unique across each record to allow us to distinguish one entity from another. So even two people had the same name, their IDs will be different. what are advantages of databases - Answer- Key to these are a single centralized data store which eliminates redundancies. You no longer have 10 or 20 spreadsheets, one for each employee or department that needs to access customer and order data. Instead it's all in a single standardized repository. This eliminates duplicate data and the problem of keeping the multiple copies synchronized or acting on the basis of old and outdated data. Also, by having a software that manages the storage and retrieval of data, application programs no longer have to worry about this aspect. They take care of the application logic or function, and leave the data access and storage to the DBMS. This helps achieve program-data independence. Among other advantages are data consistency, data sharing, simplified application development, standardization of the data, security and data quality. what are the costs and risks of databases - Answer- Migrating from a legacy system composed of independent files to a centralized common database is not easy. The up-front conversions will be costly and require people with expertise. Maintaining a large organizational database incurs an ongoing expense in terms of IT infrastructure as well as personnel. Sharing data also raises potential political problems related to who owns and can see or use different pieces of data. Explain design in databases (effective management) - Answer- When designing a database, it is important to first create a Data Model. The data model specifies what data entities (e.g., CUSTOMERS, ORDERS, PARTS) will be in the database, and how the entities are connected to each other. The data model is then translated into tables. The process of normalization ensures the database has no redundancies and will effectively support inserts, deletes, updates and queries. Before the tables are built, the data types of each column are carefully designed. This might include knowing the length of SSN or name columns, for example explain data dictionary in databases (effective management) - Answer- After the data model is complete a Data Dictionary is developed to document the structure and format of the data. The data dictionary can also specify knowledge about the domain (e.g., how discounts and tax rates are to be determined). The dictionary also includes any business rules affecting the data, such as how the data will be validated to ensure consistency. What are forms in databases? - Answer- At the very minimum, a database needs to allow you to enter data as well as retrieve data. Data in information systems and their underlying databases are often managed through the use of forms. Forms can be used to enter new data, update or delete existing data, or create query reports. The systems interact with the database by sending SQL commands to the DMBS, which then executes those commands to make the requested change or return the requested information. What is online transaction processing (OLTP) - Answer- The database systems used to interact with customers and run a business in real time!! The word "online" in this case is not about the Internet, but rather that it is available in real time or as you need it. OLTP systems include applications for order processing and sales, production, human resources operations such as payroll, and supply chain operations such as purchasing from vendors. what is a data warehouse - Answer- Integrate data from multiple databases and other data sources Contain historic as well as current data What are the types of queries and reports - Answer- Scheduled reports: Reports produced at predefined intervals—daily, weekly, or monthly—to support routine decisions Key-indicator reports: a summary of critical information on a recurring schedule Exception reports: that highlight situations that are out of the normal range Drill-down reports: Reports that provide greater detail, so as to help analyze why a key indicator is not at an Ad hoc queries: Queries answering unplanned information requests to support a non-routine decision Explain the difference between operational and informational system - Answer- The purpose of an operational system is to make the company run. This involves transaction processing, and lots of updates to the database. An OLTP system falls under this category. Informational systems, on the other hand, involve almost no updates, but require complex queries in order to provide useful information to decision makers in the organization. Data warehouses and systems for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) built on top of the warehouse, fall under the category of Informational Systems. what type of system is BI usually associated with - Answer- informational systems. explain ETL or "Extract, Transform, Load". - Answer- is involved when taking data from standard OLTP or operational databases into a data warehouse A large organization will have multiple databases and repositories. You need to "Extract" or obtain the necessary data from these databases. Then you need to "Transform" the data so it is in a common format and free of errors. Finally, you will "Load" the extracted and transformed data into the warehouse for use by decision makers. Explain a decision support system (DSS) - Answer- A decision support system or DSS is software that is designed to support organizational decision making. A DSS allows managers to examine alternative solutions to a problem, e.g., by performing what-if analyses. explain the process of a descion support system - Answer- The processing component of a DSS uses mathematical models such as simulation or time-series analysis or regression to forecast different outcome ranges. For example, you may look at past sales during Thanksgiving and estimate a likely range of sales adjusting for different parameters such as changes in market sizes, advertising promotions or competitor pricing. A commonly available tool for decision-support is spreadsheet software. For example, Excel spreadsheets provide functionality for doing what-if analyses as well as optimization. explain Online analytical processing (OLAP) - Answer- allows information seekers to quickly conduct complex, multi-dimensional queries on data. Some of these queries could normally take hours to compute. However, OLAP software pre-aggregates data so it can process complex queries in a reasonable time. Explain the OLAP terms - Answer- Measures / Facts: Facts, numerical data that can be aggregated Dimensions: Perspectives on which to view the facts Hierarchically arranged to enable drill-down and roll-up. different types of subsets that analysis can be narrowed on Cubes: Multidimensional structure of dimensions and measures Slicing and Dicing: Analyzing data on a subset of dimensions the processes of narrowing down the data what are dashboards in information visuals - Answer- Comprised of key performance indicators (KPIs) Visual display of summary information Aid in situational awareness and decision making use various graphical elements to highlight important information. explain the concept of drill down in digital dashboards - Answer- Digital dashboards often integrate analytical tools and allow users to "drill down" to more granular data by clicking on a chart or graph. So, for example, clicking on a state may permit the user to find sales and profits at the level of cities or stores. explain visual analytics - Answer- Visual analytics is the combination of various analysis techniques and interactive visualization to solve complex problems explain data mining - Answer- Discovering "hidden" predictive relationships in the data. Data mining complements OLAP Data mining applications use a variety of complex algorithms to profile, analyze and predict. explain data mining algorithms - Answer- Association discovery: :or "market basket analysis." This involves predicting which types of products will be likely to be bought by someone who purchased another product. -Clustering: finding "natural" groupings of data points based on similarity metrics. -Classification: involves trying to assign data into predefined categories -Text and web content mining Explain text mining and web mining - Answer- -Text mining: draws patterns from unstructured data such as e-mails, blogs, and other textual documents. -Web content mining: uses clickstream data and Web crawlers to examine web pages including blogs and news reports. explain presenting the results for data mining - Answer- Results from these analyses can be provided on digital dashboards, paper reports, Web portals, e-mail alerts, and mobile devices, as well as used by a variety of other information systems explain machine learning - Answer- Machine learning is a branch of intelligent systems that deal with systems that learn from known historical data. The algorithms are designed to find patterns from past training data that can be applied to new data or scenarios. Explain Artificial neural network (ANN) - Answer- algorithms are one type of machine learning. An ANN is a network of processing elements (i.e., artificial "neurons") that work in parallel to complete a task, attempt to approximate the functioning of the human brain, and can learn by example. what is a neutral network - Answer- they approximate the functioning of the brain by creating common patterns in data and then comparing new data to learned patterns to make a recommendation explain Artificial intelligence (AI) - Answer- is the science of enabling information technologies to simulate human intelligence explain an intelligence agent - Ans