Amity Business School

Decision Support for

Management
Data+ Models+Intuition
 Amity Business School
• Decision support systems –use data
and models to support management
decision making in different ways.
• Nowadays, what used to be called
decision support systems often comes
under the umbrella of business
intelligence.
• Analytics describes the application of
mathematical techniques to
organisational operations.
 Collecting Data Amity Business School

• Organisations need to collect data in order

to be able to understand and improve their
business.
• They need models (from analytics) to
interpret this data.

March 24, 2020

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 Modeling and Data Amity Business School

• A model is a selective abstraction of

reality.
– Selective
• We choose which bits to put in the model.
– Abstraction
• The model is not reality it is a simplification.

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 Modelling Amity Business School

• A model is way of representing a part of

the environment.
• Trade-off between the simplification and
the representation of reality.
– Advantages of simple models.
– Disadvantages of simple models.

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 Types of Models Amity Business School

• Mental Models
• Visual
– Also called analogue.
• Physical/Scale
– Also called iconic.
• Mathematical
– Also called quantitative.

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 Benefits of a Model Amity Business School

• Can compress time.

• Can manipulate easily.
• Can do trial and error calculations.
• Can model risk and uncertainty.

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 Benefits of Producing Models Amity Business School

• Having a model to use is beneficial but the

process of producing a model is equally if not
more beneficial.
• Helps you to understand the problem.
– Need to be explicit about your goals.
– Need to quantify the variables which affect the goals.
– Need to identify constraints and relationships between
variables.
– Facilitates communication and understanding.

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 Amity Business School

Business Intelligence
Overview
BI involves acquiring data and
information from a wide variety of
sources and utilising them in
decision-making.
 Amity Business School

• in-depth analysis of company data for

better decision-making.

• Models are used to analyse data.

 Business Intelligence Amity Business School

• Business intelligence (BI) simplifies

information discovery and analysis,
making it possible for decision-makers at
all levels of an organization to more easily
access, understand, analyze, collaborate,
and act on information, anytime and
anywhere.
(Microsoft)
 Definition of BI Amity Business School

• BI is an umbrella term that combines

architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools,
applications, and methodologies.
• BI a content-free expression, so it means different
things to different people.
• BI's major objective is to enable easy access to
data (and models) to provide business managers
with the ability to conduct analysis.
• BI helps transform data, to information (and
knowledge), to decisions and finally to action.
 Amity Business School

• The technology and processes that make

this analysis possible take unwieldy
collections of information and translate
them into organized, readily-accessible,
human-readable compilations of data.
 What can companies do with Amity Business School

BI?
Track
• their own operations
• customers’ activity patterns
• industry trends.

• fact-based assessments help companies

work toward specific goals with
confidence.
 Data is Amity Business School

1. Gathered from relevant sources

2. Filtered, and stored
3. Analysed and arranged into meaningful
patterns using different tools .
4. Business intelligence is the knowledge
gained from that data analysis.
 Overview of Business Intelligence
Amity Business School

Analytical
tools

Data Data Analysis

Sources Warehous OLAP Results
e

Data
Data Mining Data
visualisation
visualisation
.... Amity Business School

From Turban, Aronson and Liang

 Some Questions Amity Business School

• Where does the data come from?

• How can we decide what data is
important?
• How can data from different sources be
joined together (consolidated and
integrated) securely?
• How can data be analysed?
• How can these analyses be viewed?
 Where does the data come Amity Business School

from?
• Data can be collected manually or
automatically.
– Transaction data e.g. supermarket checkout,
bank withdrawal
– Time studies, questionnaire, observation
notes
– Physical sensors e.g. temperature of a rooms
in a house
– Sensors, scanners, bar codes
How can we decide what data is Amity Business School

important?
• Depends what our goals are, the
functional area(e.g. Sales, HR,
marketing..) and what processes we are
looking at..

Balanced scorecard
Critical success factors
Key performance indicators
 Human
resources Amity Business School
•employee
•organizationa
l Operations
•
Sales and marketing management
departmental •assembly speed
• products
measures
• customers Functional •warehouse stock
•manufacturer and
• demographics Areas supplier cost
• promotions •shift productivity
• sales force
• order type Finance
• currency standards
• account information
• industry trends
 Data Quality is also important Amity Business School

Garbage in..... Garbage out

• Contextual – relevance, value, timeliness
completeness, amount
• Intrinsic – accuracy, objectivity,
believability, reputation
• Accessibility DQ – ease of access,security
• Representation DQ – interpretability, ease
of understanding, concise, consistent
representation.
 Amity Business School
Example : ecological
intelligence?
What information can we access on
www.goodguide.com
What do you think the goals of someone
using this website might be?
What type of data do you think has been
analysed to give this information?
Where did the data come from?
How reliable is the data?
Can you find out how it was analysed?
 Example: What is ecological Amity Business School

intelligence?
• a vast, shared network of detailed
information regarding the full social and
ecological impact of products. Consumers
will be able to use an array of new
wireless and web-based technologies to
instantly tap into this network to find
product information, even at the point of
purchase.
 Example: Ecological Amity Business School

Intelligence
How is the data analysed?
• Industrial ecologists and engineers
deconstruct the ingredients and processes
that go into any manufactured object and
do a Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA. This
allows them to track a product’s precise
social, health and ecological effects from
production to final disposal.
 Amity Business School

Example Data Warehouse Technology :

Microsoft
How can data from different sources be joined
together (consolidated and integrated) securely?
• SQL Server provides a comprehensive
and scalable data warehouse platform
• organizations build large-scale
enterprise data warehouses that can
consolidate data from multiple disparate
systems into a single, secure,
manageable solution.
 What is a Data Warehouse? Amity Business School

A data repository that makes operational

and other data accessible in a form that is
readily acceptable for decision support
and other user applications.

Note: A data warehouse is not another word

for a database. The specific purpose of a
data warehouse is to support decisions not
operations.
27 Data 3
 Data warehouses vs
Amity Business School

operational databases
• an operational database is normalised. Each data item is only held
once.
• databases have very fast insert/update performance because only
a small amount of data in those tables is affected each time a
transaction is processed.
• Older data may be periodically purged from operational systems to
improve performance.
• Data warehouses are optimized for speed of data retrieval.
• data in data warehouses may be stored using a dimension-based
model.
• To speed data retrieval, data warehouse data are often stored
multiple times.
• Data may be held in the data warehouse even after the data has
been removed from the operational systems.
 How is the data analysed? Amity Business School

Analytics techniques – types of model

– Simulation
– Decision analysis
– Statistics : averages, correlations,
– Linear programming: optimisation
– Queuing theory: “waiting line”analysis
– Network analysis: Maximise flow through a
network e.g. A supply chain
– Multi-criteria decision making: scoring models
 Amity Business School

Example – Microsoft OLAP

How can data be analysed?
• Microsoft Online Analytical Processing
(OLAP) makes it quick and easy to
perform ad-hoc queries and analysis of
large amounts of complex data across all
aspects of your business.
 Amity Business School
Example – Microsoft OLAP
Microsoft OLAP is used to
report on...
• sales
• marketing
• management issues
• business process management
• budgeting and forecasting,
• financial issues etc..
 What is OLAP? Amity Business School

• OLAP enables you to look at and access

data in different ways (3-d data cubes) ,
drill down, view summarised data, make
calculations on the fly etc.
• http://spatialolap.scg.ulaval.ca/Examples.a
sp
• http://www.census.gov
 What is Data Mining? Amity Business School

• Data mining is a capability to support the

recognition of previously unknown but
potentially useful relationships within large
databases/ data warehouses.

• Basically software to analyse data and

spot patterns.
 Visualising Data Amity Business School

• Digital images- These can be still or animated.

• Maps e.g. Geographic Information Systems
• Multidimensions - (OLAP)
• Tables and graphs
• Virtual reality
• Dashboards
A Table Amity Business School
 A Chart Amity Business School

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 Dashboards Amity Business School

Taken from http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/034/bis.html

 Amity Business School

multiple, synchronized chart types

 
Amity Business School

                                                                                                               

                                                                 
A visualization with multiple displays showing a Supplier scorecard in conjunction with a
geographical display.
Return to Document
 Summary Amity Business School

• Decision support involves data and models

• BI involves acquiring data and information
from a wide variety of sources and utilising
them in decision-making. Data is
– Gathered, selected
– Consolidated and integrated -> data
warehouse
– Analysed in different ways (analytic
techniques)
– Results are Visualised
 We need to Understand Amity Business School

• Data issues – data quality

• Where data comes from
• How data is stored: data warehouses
• How data is analysed
• Tools to do this.
• Limitations of the computer
• Our own blind spots (if this is possible)!
 Amity Business School

References
Advanced Analytics- Information Week 2010
(analytics.informationweek.com)
Competing on Analytics - Thomas
Davenport
Harvard Business Review Jan 2006
In search of Clarity - Economist intelligence
unit 2007 (available from sap)
What is Business Intelligence (sap)