Overall Concepts
Doing "things right" (minimizing waste) versus doing "the right things" (achieving goals).
What is efficiency?
Raw facts and figures without context.
What is data?
Datasets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software.
What is big data?
A prescriptive tool in Excel to find the necessary input value (one input) to achieve a specific desired output.
What is Goal Seek?
A formal contract between a service provider and a client that defines the specific level of service expected (e.g., guaranteeing 99.9% uptime).
What is a service level agreement (SLA)?
The acronym describing the principle that poor quality input data will result in poor quality output analysis.
What is garbage in - garbage out (GIGO)?
This role bridges the gap between IT/Data teams and business stakeholders, focusing on interpreting results for business decisions.
What is a business analyst?
An analyst is trying to predict consumer sentiment but is struggling because the dataset contains tweets, Instagram photos, emails, and structured sales spreadsheets. The complexity of managing these different formats refers to this "V" in big data.
What is variety?
An approach to data analysis that focuses on discovering new patterns or relationships without a pre-existing hypothesis.
What is exploratory analytics?
A quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization or employee in meeting specific objectives.
What is a key performance indicator (KPI?)
Two types of competitive advantage that typically cannot be pursued at the same time.
What is cost leadership and quality?
A credit card company uses historical transaction data and machine learning algorithms to calculate the probability that a specific customer will cancel their card (churn) in the next six months. What type of analytics is this?
What is predictive analytics?
A bank must process millions of credit card transactions per second to detect fraud instantly before the transaction is finalized. This challenge regarding the speed of data generation and processing refers to this "V" of big data.
What is velocity?
A store manager has a specific theory: "I believe customers spend more money when we play classical music in the store." She analyzes sales data specifically to see if she can prove or disprove this hypothesis. What approach to data analysis is this?
What is confirmatory analytics?
A data point in operations that deviates significantly from the norm (e.g., a sudden spike in machine temperature), often signaling a problem.
What is an outlier (or anomaly?)
The functional area of a business responsible for managing the flow of cash through the organization and planning for profitability.
What is Finance?
A marketing team notices a drop in website traffic and uses data drilling techniques to isolate the issue, discovering that a broken link in an email campaign was the root cause of the decline. What type of analytics is this?
What is diagnostic analytics?
A university admissions office wants to process applications faster. They decide to delete the old review process, install an AI-screening tool, and redesign the workflow from scratch. What type of business process management is this?
What is business process re-engineering?
A student is calculating their final grade for a class and wants to compare the results of their two remaining options: a variety of possible scores on their final project and a variety of possible scores on their exam. Which what-if tool do you recommend?
What are data tables?
Tracking data such as "Server Downtime," "Ticket Resolution Speed," or "System Usage" falls under this specific business area.
Name two types of issues we see in "bad" data visualizations.
What are . . excess gridlines or visual noise, poor use of color, wrong type of chart, missing legend or labels?
A collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product.
What is a business process?
This process design ensures that it is clear "who does what" in the process.
What is a cross-functional (or swim lane) process flow?
Determining the optimal sales incentive to increase product sales is what type of analytics?
What is prescriptive analytics?
Name the three branches of business operations we studied.
What is supply chain ops, HR ops, and IT ops?