Decision Making using Business Intelligence

The primary purpose of Business Intelligence is to support

timely, data driven, objective business decisions

What to do when answering business questions?

Recalibrate and reinforce often

• clearly define issues before moving forward

• don’t be afraid to adjust original question

• too much change can cause lose focus

Decision Making Process

• Identify and define the problem

• find possible solutions

• determine criteria to evaluate the alternatives

• evaluate through analysis

• choose the alt

• communicate your findings

evaluation through analysis

• what data do you have

• what tools/methods do we apply?

Decision Types

• strategics

• tactical

• operational

how is strategic decision making structured?

unstructured

what does strategic decision making involve

higher level issues concerned with the overall direction of the organization

which decision type defines the organization’s overall goals and aspirations for the furture

strategic

how is tactical decision making structured

semi structured

who is responsible for tactical decision making

midlevel management

which decision making type is concerned with how the organization should achieve the goals and objectives set by its strategy

tactical

how is operational decision making structured

structured

which decision type affects the firm day to day

operational

what decision type is the domain of operations managers who are the closes to the customers

operational

strategic decision making answers what type of question?

WHY: questions on corporate directions or IT strategy

who makes strategic decisions

upper management

• executives

• board of directors

Tactical decision making answers what type of question?

WHAT: what products or target markets

operational decision making answers what type of question?

HOW WHEN WHERE WHO: productivity process web site design

ways to make decisions?

• subjective

• objective

objective approach

• data driven

• quantitative

• measurable

• numbers, structured, analytical

subjective approach

• qualitative

• perception

• intuition

• unstructured, opinion, exploratory

quantitative analytics

• descriptive

• predictive

• prescriptive (proactive)

Subjective Decision Making

• knowledge

• experience

• intuition

• intangible

• ethical issues

• facts

• risk

• luck

what is the goal in decision making?

make decisions objective and data driven. However there are always unknowns that make us rely on subjective factors. such as risks

Business intelligence vendors

create business intelligence and analytics purchased by firms

Business Intelligence

• infrastructure for collecting, storing, analyzing data produced by business

• databases, data warehouses, data marts

business analytics

• tools and techniques for analyzing data

• OLAP, statistics, models, data mining