Course

Lecture 1

Overview and
Business
Analytics
Framework
Avijit Sengupta
E-mail: [email protected]
Room: 510 Joyce Ackroyd (37) Building

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Agenda Lecture 01

• Introductions
• Business Analytics (BA) and your career
• Course overview
• Business analytics framework
• Use of BA in business
• Next Seminar

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Lecturer & Course Coordinator

• Avijit Sengupta
• Lecturer in Business Information Systems,
UQ Business School
• Room: 37-510 (St Lucia)
• Email: [email protected]

• Consultation:
• Thursday 2 pm to 4 pm
• By appointment only (by appointment only; preferably via Zoom; to make an
appointment please send an email with your concern at least 48 hours in
advance)
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What did you do on the weekend?

• Smartphones (GPS sensor data & usage)

• Listening to music
• Browsing the WWW
• Shopping
• Banking (shopping transactions)
• Email & social media usage
• Exercise tracking

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6
Business Analytics
• An approach to integrate, analyse and visualise data
to solve business problems
• It relies on strong analytics and business knowledge
• Deliver the insights using dashboards, reports and
visualisations
• Make timely and informed decisions
• Using data to understand past and current performance
• Using data to predict the future based on the past
• Using optimisation to identify the best solutions based on a
large number of variables

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Business Analytics and Your Career
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How did it all start…?

• Transactional systems emerged to automate

business processes
• Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance… [sales order entry,
payroll, employee record keeping, and shipping…]
• Databases that record a company's daily transactions
• major transactional databases include CRM (customer
relationship management), HRM (human resources
management), and ERP (enterprise resource
planning).
• Automation created huge amounts of data…
• Organisations required analytics to make sense 9
 Shift to a new economy…
• Data is the Oil of the Digital Economy
• Data scientist: the coolest job of the 21st
century
• New Roles: CDO, CIO, etc.
• Ranked as number 3 in technology
priority for executive for the last ten years
(SIM IT Trends Study 2022)
• 99% of organizations are on transformations
to become data-driven
• Data driven organization- it makes
strategic decisions based on data analysis
and interpretation
Johnson, V., Torres, R., Maurer, C., Guerra, K., Srivastava, S., & Mohit, H. (2023). The 2022 SIM IT Issues and
Trends Study. MIS Quarterly Executive, 22(1), 6. 10
Shift from division of labour to
division of learning-Knowledge
Economy
• Nature of jobs are changing
• Focus is on explaining why certain things are happening
• It requires analytical mindset and data savviness
• Organizations need data-savvy business users
• Analytics tools are becoming user-friendly
• Vendor sell analytics tools to business rather than IT
• IT professionals in silo are becoming irrelevant
• Data groups are becoming part of the business
• IT professionals are becoming business-savvy

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There is an analytics talent gap that…
• Requires an analytical and intuitive mind
• Need to understand the language of business
• Strong capabilities in data management, data
analysis & data visualisation.
• Need good communication skills to communicate
insights to decision makers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/10/11/the-data-science-talent-
gap-why-it-exists-and-what-businesses-can-do-about-it/?sh=74c529042398

“The Data Science Talent Gap: Why It Exists And What Businesses Can Do About It”

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Business analytics and
your career
Search results
• Today’s job market requires in 2018

analytics related skills Search results

in 2019
• Combined analytics and
business knowledge is the
key for success
Search results
in 2020
Search results
in 2021

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Career skills
• Data cleansing skills - Clarify meaning, remove
redundancies, investigate inconsistencies
• Data analysis skills - Correlation & association,
causation, data mining
• Visualisation skills - Geo-spatial, trend, social
network analysis, infographics
• Communication skills - Presentation and written

• https://hbr.org/2015/06/beware-spurious-correlations
• https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
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Why study this course?
This course will help you:
 develop fundamental analytics skills for a job in
business analytics
 develop hands-on data skills during practicals
 Power BI
 Microsoft SSIS
 Rapidminer
 for salaries in Australia refer to IAPA Salary Survey
• An entry-level analyst earns around $72K, while the
top 10 per cent starts at $235K
Source: https://www.adma.com.au/resources/analysts-with-soft-skills-in-high-
demand-says-iapa-research#:~:text=This%20has%20increased%20demand
%20for,cent%20starts%20at%20%24235K.
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Career roles
• Most common:
• Data analysts
• Business analysts
• Business Intelligence developers
• Process analysts

• Data Scientist
• Data Reporting Professional

• Chief Information Officer (CIO)

• Chief Data Officer (CDO)
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How Business Analytics affects business
professions?
• Every business profession is becoming data-driven
• Marketing
• Analysis of clickstreams to figure customer preferences
• Sales
• Predictions on the likelihood of a deal to close
• Human resource and talent development
• Predicting staff turn over
• Tourism
• Predicting number of tourists and provisioning of local services
• Education
• Enhancing learning experience

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Course Overview
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General aim of the course
• Provides fundamental knowledge and skills
necessary to model, integrate, analyse and visualise
data
• Provides important hands-on learning with Microsoft
Power BI, Microsoft SSIS and RapidMiner.
• Prepares and motivates students for self-learning
and taking more advanced business analytics
courses.

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 1. Introduction to
Business Analytics

3. Data
2. Data Modelling 4. Data Integration 5. Data Analytics
Visualization
Course’s
Content
Blocks 6. Impact of Data 7. Impact of Data
on Organizations on Society

Revision

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Block 1. Introduction to Business Analytics
(Today)
Week 1: Course Overview and Business Analytics
Framework

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Block 2. Data Modelling

Week 2: Relational Databases and Introduction to

Data Warehousing

Week 3: Dimensional Modelling

Week 4: Advanced Dimensional Modelling and

Warehousing Topics

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Block 3. Data Visualization

Week 5: Performance Dashboard and Information Delivery

Contents of week 1-5 are relevant

for mid-term exam

Week 6: Mid-Term Exam ( Expected-31 August 2023 10 am to 11.30

st

am )

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Block 4. Data Integration
Week 7: Data Integration and Metadata

Metadata - data that provides information about other data

Descriptive metadata – the descriptive information about a resource

Structural metadata – metadata about containers of data and indicates how compound objects are put
together
Administrative metadata– the information to help manage a resource
Reference metadata – the information about the contents and quality of statistical data
Statistical metadata, also called process data, may describe processes that collect, process, or produce
statistical data
Legal metadata – provides information about the creator, copyright holder, and public licensing

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Block 5. Data Analytics

Week 8: Data Mining Process and Predictive

Analytics

Week 9: Data Analytics- Classification and

Clustering

Week 10: Big Data Management (NoSQL and

distributed databases)

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Block 7. Impact of Data on Organizations & Society

Week 11: Advanced Business Analytics in Action

Week 12: Privacy, Ethics and Acceptable Data Use

Week 13: Assignment Q&A, Revision

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Lectures Learning Outcomes

• Lectures aims to build your:

• Foundational and in-depth knowledge
• Hands-on activities, discussions, case studies, articles
• Planned activities at the completion of each block
• Ask questions and engage!

• 2-hour lecture each week

• Uploaded at the end of each week

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Tutorial Learning Outcomes

• Tutorials aims to enhance your:

• practical data skills by working with actual data
• employability by familiarizing you with Power BI, SSIS
and RapidMiner

• NOTE: Tutorials will start next week

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Resources

• http://www.elearning.uq.edu.au
• Features: Course outline, learning guide, useful links,
formative assessment, progressive results.
• Provides all materials: lecture materials, tutorial
materials, useful videos, assignment materials
• Books:
• Ralph Kimball, Margy
Ross. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Gui
de to Dimensional Modelling, 2013
• Sharda, Ramesh, Dursun Delen
, and Efraim Turban. Business Intelligence, Analytics,
and Data Science: A Managerial Perspective. Pearson,
2018.
• Papers and other resources will be added to week-
by-week schedule on LMS

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Expectations from you

• Engage, interact, share, question…

• Give us feedback all the time…

• Connect and work as a group…

• Equitable contributions
• Focus on task and your unique contribution
• Be humble, listen to each other
• Complement each others' skills

Get Started and Stay Motivated

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Course Assessment
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Assessment 1: Individual assessment
• Mid-Semester Test (Tentative: 30 August 12 pm to
st

13.30 pm)
• Weight: 40%
• Content of the first 5 weeks
• Multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, short
questions, problem solving, etc. (can be expected)
• 30st August (12 PM to 13.30 PM)
• Hosted on Blackboard, 90 minutes

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Assessment 2: Individual assignment
• Topic: BA Case Study
• Report: 2000 to 2500 words
• Weight: 60%
• Due: 27 October 2023, 4 pm
• Electronic Submission on Blackboard/Turnitin
• Details will be published on the Blackboard site

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Introduction to the Business Analytics
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Agenda
• Competing with Data
• Business Analytics Framework
• Use of data in business

Data, Information and

Knowledge
Data is the symbolic representation of intrinsic meaning.

Information is a result of interpretation and analysis done to data.

Knowledge is the collection of capacity to act(know-how), cognition and recognition(know-what), and

understanding(know-why) of information within a company.

Knowledge consists of 2 main categories: explicit and tacit. 35

Two Fundamental Questions
• How do organisations identify areas of new business
opportunities?

• What do organization consistently innovate not to

stay behind?

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Competing with Data - Theory
• Impossible to differentiate one company from their
competitors based on products alone
• Rivals sell similar offerings
• Cheap offshore labour
• hard-pressed to beat overseas competitors on product cost
• How a company can get ahead?
• Become an data focused competitor:
• Use sophisticated data-collection technology and analysis
• Don’t only know what your customers want
• know how much they will pay and how to keep them loyal.
• Don’t just track existing inventories
• predict and prevent future inventory problems

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Competing with Strategic Data
• Complexity of the business world
• Global environment
• Information drives the bottom line
• Strategic information becomes important in creating
Competitive Advantage

• Who needs strategic information

• Those who
• Formulate business strategy
• Establish goals
• Set objectives
• Monitor results
• Usually the Executive and Manager levels, but this is
extending these days to everyone in the business….
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What is strategic information?
• Information that helps to make decisions on the
formulation and execution of business strategies and
objectives
• It is not!
• Information for the daily business operations
• Its not information to
• Produce an invoice, Make a shipment, Settle a claim etc.

• Characteristics
Integrated A single view of the firm. An Enterprise wide view
Data Integrity Accurate and conform to business rules
Accessible Easily accessible, intuitive access, responsive analysis
Credible Trusted values – every business value has ≡ 1 value
Timely Must be available with the correct timeliness for the data
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Business Analytics Framework
Source Data Data & Meta-Data Analytics and
Data Systems Staging Area Storage Area Reporting

Data Storage Meta-data

CRM Ad hoc querying
Relational, fast
Sales Dashboards
Processing
Production Extract Clean
Load Enterprise Scorecards
Feed
Data
Reconcile
HR Warehouse Report writers
Derive
End-user applications
Finance
Match
Modelling tools

Load
Internal Combine
De-duplication Data mining tools
Standardise
Stock Market Visualisation tools
Transform Data Data
Extract
Currency Conform Mart Mart
Export Data Feed
ABS
Mart
Social media Data Data
Mart Mart
External

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BA Components – Source Data Systems
• Internal data
• Operational systems producing data
• CRM
• Sales,
• Production
• Finance

• External data
• Social media
• Stock markets
• News
• Currency
• ABS

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External data example
• API's (may) allow for the
extraction of data from
external systems.
• The image on the right
shows some of the data that
is available from a single
tweet!
• There are 103 pieces of
information in this single tweet
• Look at what is being captured
under a user field

API= Application Programming Interface

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BA Components – Data Staging
• So now you’ve got the information...
• You need to store it, conform it, put it in the DW
• Data Staging Area
• Necessary to prepare data for DW upload
• Remember MANY sources, formats etc
• Need space to store data while we play
• 3 steps (ELT)
• Extraction
• Transformation
• Loading

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BA Components – Data Staging
• Data Extraction
• For each data source get the data into the staging area
• May need lots of different methods and tools
• Commercial or In-House...
• Could store the extracted data in a DBMS, flat files etc.
• Data Transformation
• Get the data into the correct format for the DW
• Type conversions, character sets, summarising or extrapolating
data to same time segments
• Data quality issues (Spelling, incorrect fields, duplicates etc)
• Data Loading
• Initial loading done the 1st time you load the DW
• Subsequent loading transfers new info to the DW

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DW Components - Data Storage:
• A Data Warehouse
• A central repository of data
• Read only to users
• Read write only to ELT processes
• Relational (usual) or multidimensional or
NOSQL databases
• Can be a combination of all of the above
• Data Marts
• Subsections of the data warehouse (called
Data Marts) to report on specific areas of
the organisation.
• The Data Mart optimises metrics for the
business area which it reports on
• Meta-Data
• Information about data 45
BA Components– Analytics and Reporting
• Data is visualised for the user
• Lots of users, different expertise levels, different complexity
of queries
• Combination of prefabricated reports and build it yourself
queries and reports
• Lots of different methods of delivering the information, via
lots of different sources

• Data is further analysed to create insights

• Descriptive analytics
• Diagnostic analytics
• Predictive analytics
• Prescriptive analytics

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BA Components– Analytics and Reporting

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Business Analytics Framework- Our Scope in
this Subject

1. ER models to understand 3. Data Integration 2. Design a DW (dimensional 4. Dashboarding and basic analytics
transactional or relational
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Modelling)
databases
Learning Outcomes Schematically!

Transactional Analytical Database Reporting and

Databases Analytics
Building Dashboards
Sales

HR

ETL Feed
Finance
Data Warehouse Data Analytics

Marketing

ER modelling and
Dimensional Modelling
Normalization

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Use of Business Analytics in
Business
• Supply chain
• Simulate and optimize supply chain flows; reduce inventory
and stock-outs.
• Dell, Wal-Mart, Amazon
• Customer selection,
• Identify customers with the greatest profit potential;
• Harrah’s, Capital One,
• Loyalty and service
• increase likelihood that they will want the product or service
offering; retain their loyalty.
• Barclays
• Pricing
• Identify the price that will maximize yield, or profit.
• Progressive, Marriott
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Use of Business Analytics in
Business
• Human capital
• Select the best employees for particular tasks or jobs, at
particular compensation levels.
• New England Patriots, Oakland A’s, Boston Red Sox
• Product and service quality
• Detect quality problems early and minimize them.
• Honda, Intel
• Financial performance
• Better understand the drivers of financial performance and
the effects of nonfinancial factors.
• MCI, Verizon
• Research and development
• Improve quality, efficacy, and, where applicable, safety of
products and services.
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• Novartis, Amazon, Yahoo
 Click icon to add picture

Any Question?

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Critical Thinking Related Questions

Q1. What are the probable challenges of collecting data from internal and external data source?

Q2. What are the main challenges of data integration?

Q3. What are the advantages of a visual dashboard?

Awareness Questions
Q4. What are Large Language Models? How large language models are going to shape the nature of
business in future?

Q5. What are the different ways of lying with data visualization and what are ways through which one can
identify those visualizations?

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Course Communication Channels

• If you have a content related questions (e.g.,

lecture or tutorial or assignment), Please use
Ed Discussion.
Access
Discussion
Board here

In your communications, please be polite,

courteous, and professional
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Course Communication Channels (cont.)

Lecture specific questions (name lecture and slide #)

Submit weekly questions for Q&A video
Tutorial specific questions
Questions for your Mid-term preparation
Questions that help complete the assignment
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Next seminar
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Next Seminar

• How data is stored in operational

databases?
• Relational databases and normalization!

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Issues, Investments, Concerns, & Practices of Organizations and their IT Executives 2022 Comprehensive
Report: Results and Observations from the SIM IT Trends Study

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 Click icon to add picture

What about your

expectations from the
course?

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Competitive Advantage
• Consistently superior performance, ROI
• compared to competitors
• based on unique (rare) resources (assets) that cannot be
easily imitated, long-lived, sustainable
https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2015_0901_DataStrategicAsset_WixomBeath

• Innovation key source of CA

• product/service and process innovation
• innovation process, information, R&D investment
• irreversible resource commitment, asset renewal

Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of

management, 17(1), 99-120.
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A Question?
• How do we source Strategic Information in an
organisation?
Clue for Data Hunt

The IT department will usually know where to find certain data and probably
already stores a lot of it in a warehouse; finance departments generate
significant, useful business data; commercial routes to market (consumer
connection points) may have access to a wealth of behavioral data.

Data ‘hides’ in customer services, in market research and product surveys; etc.

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