MIS 453:

Big Data, BI, Business Analytics,

& Intro to Data Visualization
What is one of the
main constant
activities in any
Business?!
Decision
s
Decisions
• Decisions drive companies
• Better decisions lead to:
oMore efficient operation
oHigher profitability
oGreater customer satisfaction
• Companies that make better decisions
are more successful
decision-making processes and
computerized decision support
framework
• Decision making: a process of choosing among alternatives
• Simon’s Process: Intelligence, Design, and Choice
• The Intelligence Phase – identifying the real problem (or
opportunity)
• Problem Classification, Problem Decomposition
• Problem Ownership
• The Design Phase – developing and analyzing possible
courses of action (via modeling)
• The Choice Phase – making the decision
• The Implementation Phase – turning the decision into
action
Decisions and BI!
What is Business Intelligence?
• Data , Information, Decision
• BI as a Decision-making process
• BI as an Information Systems
 what is business intelligence?
• Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications,
technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing,
and analyzing data to help business users make better
decisions
• “A variety of software applications used to analyze an
organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of
several related activities, including data mining, online
analytical processing (OLAP), querying and reporting.”
• “An umbrella term that combines architectures, tools,
databases, analytical tools, applications, and methodologies.”
• “Transform raw data into meaningful and useful information
for business purposes”
evolution of computerized decision
support to analytics/data science
Why now?
 the data deluge

• The Data Deluge: “As the amount of available data

grows, the problem of managing the information
becomes more difficult.”
• What can we do??
• Data (Big Data or otherwise) is worthless if it does
not provide business value - and for it to provide
business value, it has to be analyzed
 changing environments
& evolving needs
• Increased hardware, software, and network capabilities
• Group communication and collaboration
• Improved data management
• Managing giant data warehouses and Big Data
• Analytical support
• Overcoming cognitive limits in processing and storing
information
• Knowledge management
• Anywhere, anytime support
How data insights drive business:
 who uses BI systems
• TONS OF INDUSTRIES
• Think about how some of these sectors uses BI
systems:
▪ Restaurant chains
▪ Grocery Stories
▪ Retail
▪ News Media
▪ Blogs
• Any more??
the architecture of BI
capabilities of BI systems
 components of BI architecture
• Data Warehouse: database that is
specifically structured and designed
for querying, reporting, and analysis
▪ stores current and historical data and are used
for creating trending reports for senior
management reporting such as annual and
quarterly comparisons

• Business analytics technologies: the

tools that help the user transform
data into knowledge (e.g., queries,
data/text mining tools, etc.)
 components of BI architecture cont’d
• Business performance measurement: (i.e., managing
business performance) emerging portfolio of applications
within the BI framework that provides enterprises tools they
need to better manage their operations
o Examples :
▪ Planning and budgeting
▪ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
▪ Benchmarking

• User interface: (i.e., dashboards) provide a comprehensive

graphical/pictorial view of corporate performance measures,
trends, and exceptions.
 example of BPM and user interface

•
 why is BI important?
▪ Improve decision making, cut costs and identify new
business opportunities
▪ Identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for
re-engineering
▪ Analyze data quickly
▪ Transforming decision making to a more
data/fact/information driven activity
▪ Should help execute the business strategy and not be
an impediment for it!
 potential barriers to BI success

▪ Inaccurate data
▪ Tools not user-friendly
▪ Do not understand company’s business
processes
▪ Cultural challenge
▪ Data privacy concerns (ethical issues)
 analytics overview

▪ Analytics…a relatively new term/buzz-word

▪ Analytics…the process of developing actionable
decisions or recommendations for actions based on
insights generated from historical data
▪ According to the Institute for Operations Research
and Management Science (INFORMS)
▪ Analytics represents the combination of
computer technology, management science
techniques, and statistics to solve real problems.
Three Types of Analytics
 descriptive analytics
• Descriptive or reporting analytics
• Answering the question of what happened
• Retrospective analysis of historic data
• Enablers
– OLAP / DW
– Data visualization
▪ Dashboards and Scorecards
– Descriptive statistics
 predictive analytics
• Aims to determine what is likely to happen in the
future (foreseeing the future events)
• Looking at the past data to predict the future
• Enablers
– Data mining
– Text mining / Web mining
– Forecasting (i.e., time series)
 prescriptive analytics
• Aims to determine the best possible decision; What should
happen?
• Uses both descriptive and predictive to create the alternatives,
and then determines the best one
• Enablers
– Optimization
– Simulation
– Multi-Criteria Decision Modeling
– Heuristic Programming
• Analytics Applied to Many Domains
• Analytics or Data Science?
 data visualization
Data visualization: presentation of data in a pictorial
or graphical format
• Faster for people to grasp the meaning of many data
points when they are displayed in charts and graphs
rather than poring over piles of spreadsheets or
reading pages and pages of reports.
• Why is data visualization important?
• Some cool visualizations:
https://informationisbeautiful.net/data/
Plan of the
Book
New tools and architectures
may be needed