Business intelligence and decision making

Strategic decisions

Typically unstructured Involve higher-level issues concerned with the overall direction of the organization

Tactical decisions

Typically semi-structured, Concern how the organization should achieve the goals and objectives set by its strategy Usually responsibility of midlevel management

Operational decision

Typically structured, Affects how the firm is run from day to day Domain of operations managers

Objective

data driven Quantitative Measurable Structured

Subjective

Qualitative Uses perception Intuition Unstructured

Business intelligence objective

To make timely, data-driven, objective business decisions

Decision making process

1. Identify and define the problem 2. Check what possible solutions are there 3. Determine the criteria to evaluate the alternatives 4. Evaluation through analysis 5. Choose the alternative 6. Communicate your findings

Business effective communications

Have to properly communicate to audience with the right message and timing

Descriptive analytics

Describes performance based on established data EX: financial reports and statistics

Prescriptive analytics

Analysis of current data and situations EX: optimization and simulations

Predictive analytics

Predict future trends and behavior based on past performance EX: credit scoring, sales projections

Data visualization

Allows for data to be seen, ask, answer, and raise new questions

Data storytelling

The building of fully interactive dashboards and stories using visualizations so data can be shared with others in an effective and engaging way

Supervised machine learning

Uses annotations and labels

Unsupervised machine learning

No labels used, data is classified using intrinsics and clustering of data based on similar characteristics

Reinforcement learning

Instead of specifying the label, goal and reward are specialized

If algorithm moves towards goal it is rewarded, and it is penalized if it isn’t