Chapter 9: Business Intelligent Systems

How do organizations use business intelligence (BI) systems?

• BI systems are information systems that process operational and other data to identify patterns, relationships, and trends for use by business professionals and other knowledge workers.
• Five standard IS components are present in BI systems: hardware, software, data, procedures, and people.
• The boundaries of BI systems are blurry

• Use BI for all four of the collaborative tasks described in Chapter 2.

Falcon Security could use BI to determine whether it could save costs by rerouting its drone flights.

Typical Uses for BI

•Identifying changes in purchasing patterns

–Important life events change what customers buy.

•Entertainment

–Netflix has data on watching, listening, and rental habits.

–Classify customers by viewing patterns.

•Predictive policing

–Analyze data on past crimes - location, date, time, day of week, type of crime, and related data.

Just-in-Time Medical Reporting

•Example of real time data mining and reporting.

•Injection notification services

–Software analyzes patient’s records, if injections needed, recommends as exam progresses.

•Blurry edge of medical ethics.

What are the three primary activities in the BI process?

• These activities directly correspond to the BI elements in Figure 9-1.
• The four fundamental categories of BI analysis are reporting, data mining, BigData, and knowledge management.
• Push publishing delivers business intelligence to users without any request from the users; the BI results are delivered according to a schedule or as a result of an event or particular data condition. Pull publishing requires the user to request BI results.

Using business intelligence to find candidate parts at Falcon Security

• Identify parts that might qualify.
• Provided by vendors who make part design files available for sale.
• Purchased by larger customers.
• Frequently ordered parts.
• Ordered in small quantities.
• Used part weight and price surrogates for simplicity.

Acuire Data: Extracted Order Data

• Query

Sales (CustomerName, Contact, Title, Bill Year, Number Orders, Units, Revenue, Source, PartNumber)

Part (PartNumber, Shipping Weight, Vendor)

How do organizations use data warehouses and data marts to acquire data?

• Functions of a data warehouse
• Obtain data from operational, internal and external databases.
• Cleanse data.
• Organize and relate data.
• Catalog data using metadata.

Components of a data warehouse

Data Warehouses vs Data Marts

• The data analysts who work with a data warehouse are experts at data management, data cleaning, data transformation, data relationships, and the like. However, they are not usually experts in a given business function.
• A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse. A date mart addresses a particular component or functional area of the business.

How do organizations use reporting applications?

• Create meaningful information from disparate data sources.
• Deliver information to user on time.
• Basic operations:
• Sorting   
• Filtering
• Grouping   
• Calculating 
• Formatting

Unsupervised Data Mining

• No a priori hypothesis or model.
• Findings obtained solely by data analysis.
• Hypothesized model created to explain patterns found.
• Example: Cluster analysis.

Supervised Data Mining

• Uses a priori model.
• Prediction, such as regression analysis.
• Ex: CellPhoneWeekendMinutes

  = (12 + (17.5*CustomerAge)+(23.7*NumberMonthsOfAccount)

  = 12 + 17.5*21 + 23.7*6 = 521.7 minutes

What is the role of knowledge management systems?

• Knowledge Management (KM)
• Creating value from intellectual capital and sharing knowledge with those who need that capital.
• Preserving organizational memory
• Capturing and storing lessons learned and best practices of key employees.
• Scope of KM same as SM in hyper-social organizations.