#businesintelligence

Rise of Self-Service Analytics-What’s Your Call?

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

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