BUS610: Advanced Business Intelligence and Analytics

Once you have read, think through the discussion questions after reading the example of Belgium Brewing. How does this process take place in your organization? Are the employees a big part of the decision-making process, or does management maintain most of the control? Have you been asked to support strategic, operational, or tactical decision-making? How could Belgian Brewing use BI to enhance its decisions on how to increase sustainability while growing profits in the future?

Think about Malcolm Gladwell's stories about his friend Howard Moskowitz. Imagine how much more satisfied Prego was with Howard's decision-making support than Pepsi was. It took Howard several years after the Pepsi taste tests to realize Pepsi was asking the wrong question about how much aspartame to put in its new Diet Pepsi formula. By that time, he was primed to rethink Prego's approach to gaining market share by focusing on taste and texture.

When conducting market or competitive intelligence analysis, an external client typically arrives with a question they need to be answered to increase their market share or otherwise increase their competitive advantage(s). Such questions are called intelligence requirements. In business intelligence, which is focused internally, the client will come from within the business itself. This can make the process of ensuring the client is asking the right questions more or less difficult than telling an external client that they don't need to know what they think they need to know.

When an organization has fully embraced the value of BI, its culture will allow the analyst to "speak truth to power" and inform management that they are asking the wrong question without issue. When a business only thinks it is using BI, it may be more difficult for the analyst to speak up and challenge prevailing assumptions. This culture is the first thing for the analyst to recognize.

If the environment is permissive, there will be no obstacles to the analyst suggesting changes to the requirement. In a less permissive business environment, the analyst will have to learn how to most effectively communicate with their decision-makers by first identifying their individual motivations and influences and how to best communicate their findings, whether through written reports or in-person briefings.

The analyst will also have to learn how formal or informal these communications should be. This is fodder for an entire course as the possible intentions and communication strategies are infinite, but the article on negotiation in 2.1.3. may be of some use as you develop your strategies for communicating with your decision-makers.

Without a TOR, analysts and teams are likely to go off and get lost "in the weeds", chasing interesting tangential leads that may not have ultimate value to the project, thus expending limited resources in both time and budget without gaining relevant insights and moving the project forward.

This additional reading provides some process ideas, from brainstorming to mind mapping, that may help you think about ensuring all needed elements end up in the TOR. Here are two models from environmental protection and education that can help you create the TOR template that is right for your business.

We will further investigate refining the scope of your project in the next lesson once the main parameters of the project are defined in the TOR.

Sometimes there are competing priorities in an analyst team. We will discuss analytic team dynamics later in the course. For now, it will be useful to understand that defining the scope of your project beyond the TOR will require some negotiation within the team. To do this effectively without causing disagreements within a team that must continue to work together for a shared goal. Read this article on negotiation to understand how to manage competing priorities, etc.

Have you participated in negotiations at work? Have they followed the flow of the model from the article? Or have they been contentious or messy without a collaborative or satisfactory outcome? When everyone comes to the table with a positive attitude and is prepared with all of the information needed to develop an effective work plan, the experience can be very positive.

The article mentions the need for managers involved in the negotiation to be mindful of delegation. Part of the negotiation at this stage should be establishing the roles and responsibilities of each team member. It will be important to determine who has the needed skills and place them in the appropriate roles with the necessary authorities so they can participate in the project as meaningfully as possible. Once roles and responsibilities are determined, deliverables, project milestones, and timelines can be established.

This insight has profound implications for economics, public policy, and our self-awareness, which can help BI analysts avoid bias.

Kahneman and his long-time thinking partner, Amos Tversky, famously changed how humans think about their own cognition and are known for popularizing the concepts associated with behavioral economics and our awareness and understanding of our thought processes, or metacognition.

Kahneman's examples may not seem relevant to business or management, but a decision-maker's memory of the outcome of previous decisions may inappropriately cloud their recall of the process or certain aspects of the implementation. This may result in a manager believing deeply that a particular analytic method or other approach is useless because "it did not work last time". This natural human failure to correctly recall an experience and rely on memory, what Tversky and Kahneman call simply "the story we tell ourselves about the experience", can result in faulty decision-making.

In this exercise, you will create a two-column journal and describe what the text is saying and how that information makes you feel or think. This gives us insights into our thinking processes and pathways. Read the first excerpt, then make your own basic evidence log. Consider what the text says and means to you, and practice using your log for the next examples.

High school teachers have developed a useful matrix to determine when students are effectively using heuristics that are useful to us. Think about how you have used some of these heuristics today or in the past few days. How useful were they in determining an optimal outcome?

The examples from the article on defining your scope were varied, but your team is likely to produce a series of brief reports that bring you closer to understanding your target or full requirement. Once you have broken the requirement into specific parts, you will begin to attack the target from various sides and must identify who is responsible for what. As you will see from reading the article, some decision-making methods are used to determine who needs to be part of the decision-making process, depending upon their deciding authority or skills. For instance, someone from finance would need to be in on a procurement process, but maybe not someone from HR, unless it was a tool to be used by their department.

The fox vs. hedgehog construct can be likened to the "Soldier" vs. "Scout" approach to the world described in the video.

Do you think an analyst should be more like Galef's Soldier or Scout? What about a manager? How can the Scout traits be enhanced to increase analytic agility like the Fox's? Not only do they know many tricks, but they assess when and how to use them for the greatest effect. This is the same way a good analyst uses various analytic techniques to ensure the one or a combination selected is the right approach for each requirement.

Author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the "gut" approach the same year with his book, "Blink", which suggested that some people's snap decisions may be better than analysis. In combination, the two books were conflated by laypeople to suggest that there is little need for analysis, but that is an erroneous reading of both books.

Tetlock suggested experts get lazy and start thinking they know everything about their narrow field, and that's when they start making poor forecasts. Dilettantes know they don't know everything and try to update their understanding. Analysts use tested methods to analyze the situation and constantly allow the introduction of new information, whether or not it confirms or refutes their initial hypothesis, using lots of clever analytic tricks to maintain objectivity and create the most accurate estimates.

Gladwell said experts can sometimes make snap decisions better than others based on their inherent subject-matter knowledge. He used the example of an ancient Greek art expert who could spot a fake statue based on a feeling when he saw it objectively because "it just didn't look right...it looked fresh" and not 2,000 years old.

The first expert's colleague, also an expert, so wanted such an object in his museum he allowed his expertise and objectivity to be set aside to believe the fake was real, thus allowing any new information to either confirm his belief or he rejected the information out of hand. This is not good analysis. The snap decision of the correct expert is also not analysis; it was a good use of his specialized art history knowledge.

Watch this video for a basic case study showing how some simple forecasting can inform the optimal ways for a business to intervene in its strategy as conditions change. For instance, if you are trying to sell sneakers in the Netherlands, how could foreknowledge of the pandemic have helped you plan?

While public health officials have warned that the possibility of such an event was increasing with the rise of globalization, most businesses were probably not prepared for it unless they sold personal protective equipment (PPE). For instance, if you were the owner of a sports footwear company that happened to be the daughter of a high-ranking World Health Organization official, you might have been thinking about a pandemic.

Once it began, you were ready for the rise in outdoor activities as spring turned into summer in the Netherlands, and people were spending more time outdoors as they had time and needed to entertain their kids. The virus is believed to be spread less quickly in areas with good ventilation. Thus, even your older population with little interest in sports may become a new target market. Due to your forecasting ability, you were prepared ahead of your competition to make an intervention in your sports shoe strategy and be the first to serve this space.