Journey To Mastery: BI Edition

Business Intelligence Master of Science Degree, I am very proud of my accomplishment. December 19th, 2014 marks the day when my professional journey in the Business Intelligence Field has begun. In the beginning of the program I did not expect that upon completion of the program that not only would my knowledge be expanded but also my life would be completely different. I have transformed into a data-driven analyst that currently on contract at Universal Orlando Resort. As a graduate you can only dream of obtaining your degree in one hand and a job in the other and I would like to say to whomever is reading this post that it is truly a wonderful feeling.

While compiling my capstone project this year, I developed a passion for market research. Focusing my efforts on the retail grocer industry I was able to identify business problems for my selected company and provide a data driven solution designed to increase sales and customer satisfaction.  In addition to market research, I’ve also increased my leadership skills by conducting self-assessments that identify critical areas of professionalism such as emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Looking forward, I’ve enrolled myself in additional courses after graduation that teaches me how to formulate context-relevant questions and hypotheses to drive data scientific research, identify, obtain, and transform a data set to make it suitable for the production of statistical evidence communicated in written form and build models based on new data types, experimental design, and statistical inference. Also, I plan on learning R programming and content strategy to significantly improve my abilities to understand audiences and develop strategic words, pictures, graphics, and videos to convey my organization’s most important goals.

- Jonathan

Case Study No. I

This month in the Business Intelligence Case Study course we were able to review several case studies that offered very detailed information. Beginning with Johnson & Johnson’s traumatic experience in 1982, several customers were poisoned due to tampering with Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol product. The product was laced with cyanide and it put the company in a compromising position. The fear of loosing their strong customer base over night was enormous. However, despite such terrible business problems, the company’s leadership was able to identify root causes to the issues and discovered that capsules type pharmaceutical drugs run the risk of being tampered and replaced them with branded tablets variations that reduce the ability to disguise and manipulate the original Tylenol product. Johnson & Johnson’s successful responses to malicious attack on their customers was swift and efficient, they manage to turn a problem into an innovative solution and seized the opportunity to introduce to the market a new product.

Case Study No. II

The next business case that we studied was Carnival Cruise Line and the travel industry. We learned techniques to identify business problems such as root cause analysis and GAP analysis. Carnival Cruise Lines is an industry leader that was experiencing problems with managing their costumers’ data. The problem was that Travel agencies accounted for 85% of customer bookings and was the first point of contact for data gathering on customers. This problem left Carnival with a database that was less than effective and limited their marketing and sales strategies. One of the key initiatives for Carnival was to leverage existing BI tools and restructuring their existing POS systems to collect additional information on customers during purchasing transitions. In order to reduce such a expensive cost associated with travel agency commissions, Carnival needed to gain back direct booking power.

Conclusion

Business intelligence Leadership and Communication

  This course successfully injected a deeper understanding of my professional image in so many ways. Inspired by the material, I decided to purchase the hard copy version of the book to read at my convenience in addition to the eBook provided. I found that there is also an application that one can use to put the concepts into practice. 

In the book by James Kouzes  “The Leadership Challenge’ It stated, Progress is not made in giant leaps; it’s made incrementally. Exemplary leaders move forward in small steps with little victories. They turn adversity into advantage, setbacks into successes. They persevere with grit and determination. (Kouzes 156) GRIT is simply the strength of character and the courage to resolve. During the Mastery: Leadership and Development course in the beginning of our program we conducted an initial GRIT assessment and I scored very high, however now I have the tools to structure a plan to get better at my weaknesses.

This month we had an overview of five exemplary practices of leadership. Model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart; these practices involves to a life long journey to mastery in that I am prepared to model.

Final Statements

Great news! I have been selected to work for a wonder company here in the local Orlando area. This course came into my life at the right moment; I now walk into my office with “super powers” knowing that I have the tools to exceed the expectations of my employer. I carry myself with a refreshed knowledge of self and how to inspire a shared vision. Fortunately for me, my colleagues also carry the spirit of the leadership challenge and conduct themselves almost as if they too were reading the book.

Data Visualization and Creative Reporting was an amazing course. This month I was able to take the time to focus on the impact of my visualizations. Everything that I had in mind about design creation was mostly accurate prior to the start of the course. However, the textbook provided enabled students to dive deeper in to aesthetics of visualization and design & development considerations such as, how to define your audience, data mapping, visualizing spatial relationships and more.

  Breath of Fresh Air: Acquired Skills

Conducting research to complete each assignment this month enabled me to get a concrete definition to regression analysis and correlations that can confidently articulate to my audience. Online courses can be very complex however, I was able to train myself on IBM’s SPSS software and the video tutorials provided by Lynda.com gave further explanation to the statistical analysis techniques that we’ve previously explored. Unfortunately, I was unable to submit an assignment using the software since it was a trail based subscription and I needed time to learn the program prior to applying my new skills, however I do plan on using it for my upcoming capstone project. In particular, I am anxious to discover information that was once unknown and now found, using scatter plot matrices. Scatter-plot Matrices was introduced to me during SPSS training and is a wonderful way to tackle large volumes of data and get a quick snapshot of relationships by adding regression lines. This skill has given me a starting point for story telling through visualization that will open up interesting discussions.

  Moving Forward

We began this course by opening the Model & Simulation (MS) Theory/Toolbox. MS is a dynamic system the designs and develop a business process infrastructure in various domains. Our instructor selected a great book that was able to support beginner to intermediate knowledge on the subject matter. We developed knowledge on the four phases of the M&S development Model, Code, Execute, and Analyze to the application of Monte Carlo Simulation, Discrete-Event Simulations and Dynamic Systems.

The course offered foundational knowledge on technical terms utilized in the business that enabled students to structure our models given the appropriate fidelity, validity, resolution and process specific scalability requirements to optimize our models.

Course discussions along with independent research yielded interesting information on human behavior modeling. During the course I was able to acquire knowledge outside my industry of choice (retail) and find out how one can model human behaviors found in the medical industry. Medical case studies researched offered in-depth analysis of seasoned pediatric nurses versus newly hired nurses and their unique ability to respond to newborn babies symptoms.  After completion of this discussion, I quickly developed an additional source of inspiration for BI that will lead me towards the successful completion of the BIMS program here at Full Sail University.

  Introduction

This course was filled with valuable information. We covered topics such as evaluating a brand, online community network analysis, stock market terminology and more. Continuing on with the blueprint of this program, the Patterns & Recognition course contributed to our data collection skills by focusing on parsing data from HTML and flat files such as PDF’s. This method of collecting data struck a light bulb in my head and supported the design of my capstone project.

  Parsing Data

Although scraping data can reduce countless hours of data collection, data management could still be prolonged, as not all data is clean. This month we explored a real world scenario where we had to parse data from a magazine in effort to analyze data on the top 50 fast food chain restaurants and there were hours of clean up work required maintaining data integrity.

  Course Critique

Patterns & Recognition delivered structured assignments with additional resources to support each student. I was impressed with the knowledge my instructor provided and he was very helpful in regards to questions pertaining to further techniques for data collection that was valuable in the development of my capstone project. Moving further, I will forever view social media in a new light. I once was just like everyone else aimlessly posting on online communities my thoughts and life events however, I now see it from a data analyst prospective and that is that all online communities are vast repositories of data.

  Conclusion

The Data Mining course was a breath of fresh air. This month I was able to display knowledge that I have accumulated throughout the program. Since day one I was eager to impress my instructor and to gain a deeper understanding of what data mining was all about. Prior to enrollment I did not fully understand the definition of data mining, but today I can say that I have a good understanding of data mining and the value it brings to knowledge discovery.

Our assignments were challenging and stressed the importance of authoritative resources and professional writing. Inspired by my instructors advanced knowledge in each subject; I decided to dig deeper into my strengths.  One assignment in particular that interest me involved business intelligence application in social networks and instantaneously I was excited to conduct research. Connecting with my passion, this assignment opened my eyes to a new interest in BI, which was data mining social network databases.

We learned more about commercial data mining product as well as free programs available that assist in data mining such as R programming. Each tool discovered this month lured me into a world of technology that was waiting for me upon graduation. Classification and regression data mining techniques where covered this month. There are two of the most popular data mining technique since they are they are easier to understand and business users appreciate when complex data can be simplified. I also got the chance to gain experience using Tableau Public, MicroStrategy desktop, and QlikView. Discovering that tableau was the right fit for my workflow, I decided to make it BI tool of choice.

This month in Business Intelligence Analytic I learned a great deal of information. We covered the following topics

Frequency distributions

Quantitative and qualitative graphs

Probability

Sampling distributions

Descriptive & inferential statistics

Statistical quality control

Decision making under risk & uncertainty

              Business Intelligence Technology was and excellent course! Mr. Taylor was a straightforward instructor with high expectations and standards in regards to assignment submissions. This course provided me with another look at the in-depth research that will be expected on a BI Practitioner in the future. As the weeks past by, I began to enjoy the search for additional resources and I learned the value of time management and authoritative content.

            Data mining was a topic that interest me prior to enrolling in this program and this month we touched on the subject and I have finally clarified the definition of data mining and that is “ The process of automatically discovering useful information in large data repositories”.  With key words being automatically and large data repositories, I have now gained an understanding of what is data mining and what is not data mining. I am looking forward to our upcoming data-mining course to obtain further knowledge on the subject matter and add to my knowledge in Business Intelligence Technologies.

            This month we also looked into Pentaho BI Suite and analyzed the capabilities of the suite. During this assignment I also learned the value of Gartner Magic Quadrant reports in the Business Intelligence industry. Although a niche brand Pentaho is well on their way to becoming innovators due to their open source analytic capabilities which was discussed in the Gartner report as a key feature in the future of BI.

This month’s Enterprise Data Management course was a suspenseful journey. Structured with assignments geared to promote self-driven individual’s conceptual capabilities. However, more time needed so be spent on concepts in virtual classrooms to ensure that the design & development of an enterprise data warehouse solution was comprehensive enough through verbal interaction. Most of our time spend in this course was reading out of the textbooks. Unfortunately, online training environments are inevitably structured this way.  Distance learning will train some of the most promising students, due to the amount of competency that is expected of you prior to enrollment, whether as an undergraduate or graduate student, many challenges exist.

The number one thing that I learned about myself in this course is that, my intuition that influenced me to enroll in this degree program is coming to life and my strengths are beginning to align with a data driven career path. This month I must spend countless hours researching and putting together connections between the data, knowledge and information gained to provide businesses with better solutions. This is a skill set that I have been practicing in my normal life events throughout the years but never attached a technical or professional title to it.

Hello everyone,