MGMT 450 Chapter 07
Discuss how expert systems function and the challenges faced by developers in building it.
An expert system mimics the reasoning of a human expert, drawing from a base of knowledge about a particular subject area to come to a decision or recommendation. To build an expert system, developers work with experienced and specialized professionals as they provide answers to questions and explain their reasoning processes. The output is fine-tuned continually as the experts contribute more knowledge to the base, refine the rules, and add additional questions. The process is challenging, often because experts don't quite know exactly how they reach their conclusions. Formally identifying the actual steps is harder than it appears, but the results can be quite dramatic and enormously useful for decision support.
What is artificial intelligence and how is it an integral part of the decision support system?
Artificial intelligence (AI) describes the capability of some machines that can mimic human intelligence, displaying characteristics such as learning, reasoning, judging, and drawing conclusions from incomplete information. For business, AI makes valuable contributions in areas such as financial monitoring and customer relationship management. AI is also valuable for fast-moving emergency situations when the volume of incoming data could overwhelm human decision makers. The human and robot together learn from one another, just as a human baby and parent learn from and adapt to each other's moods.
What are the three key types of decision making levels?
Business intelligence supports three different types of decision making levels. These are primarily decisions made at the operational level, tactical level, and strategic level. Operational-level decisions involve routine transactions and direct interaction with customers. These decisions may involve unprogrammed decision making, but generally consist of programmed decisions. On the other hand, tactical-level decisions draw upon business intelligence to make mid-level decisions, the kind that may guide individual business units. Decisions about marketing plans, product development, membership drives, departmental budgets, and other initiatives are generally tactical. Decisions made at the strategic level have widespread effects throughout the organization and beyond, to suppliers, customers, and even the whole industry. Each decision could commit huge amounts of capital and people to major initiatives.
________ is a test created by software developers to thwart software bots where the visitor must pass before continuing to register or enter the site.
CAPTCHA
________ refers to the ratio of visitors who complete an activity on a site divided by the total number of visitors.
Conversion rate
Which of the following functions do intelligent agents undertake in business intelligence?
Correct extracting useful business information from publicly accessible Web sites
________ refers to analyzing historical and seasonal trends and then taking into account existing and predicted business conditions to estimate some variable of interest.
Forecasting
What is forecasting and how does it work?
Forecasting tools usually analyze historical and seasonal trends and then take into account existing and predicted business conditions to estimate some variable of interest, such as customer demand or projected revenue. Forecasting tomorrow's demand, next month's sales, or next year's stock price relies especially on statistical decision support tools. For example, forecasting will depict the relationship between the summer season and an increase in the sale revenue of ice cream.
________ is a decision support tool, often based on an Excel model, in which the user sets a target value for a particular variable, such as profit/ loss, and tells the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal.
Goal seeking analysis
Which of the following is a feature of optimization?
It allows a user to change many variables to reach its maximum or minimum target.
Which of the following is a function of bots?
It collects data from web pages on behalf of a user.
Which of the following is a feature of the executive information system?
It involves tools that support strategic-level decision making for senior managers.
Which of the following statements is true of expert systems?
It mimics the reasoning of a human expert.
________ refers to the use of relevant text ads that appear as sponsored links along with the results of a particular word search in a search engine.
Keyword advertising
Which among the following software tools is commonly used as the front end for data retrieval and analysis in most business intelligence tools?
MS Excel
________ is a statistical technique that reveals customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items.
Market basket analysis
________ systems allow users to interactively retrieve meaningful information from data, examining it from many different perspectives, and drilling it down into specific groupings.
Online analytical processing
What is an online analytical processing system and how does it work?
Online analytical processing systems allow users to interactively retrieve meaningful information from data, examining it from many different perspectives and drilling down into specific groupings. The software allows users to "slice and dice" massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends. OLAP systems help spot suspicious activity as well. Medicare anti-fraud strike forces, for example, use such systems to detect unusual billing that might point to illegal scams. OLAP systems achieve their speed and their slice-and-dice capabilities by building multidimensional cubes. These are data structures that contain detailed data, and also aggregated values for the dimensions, metrics, and hierarchies the users need.
Which of the following is a difference between operational-level and tactical-level decision making?
Operational decisions require detailed structured information about actual transactions by customers, whereas tactical decisions need more aggregated information to monitor success and plan next steps.
What are the major differences between the key levels of decision making?
Operational-level decision making requires detailed structured information about actual transactions by customers, so staff can follow up and track each transaction. However, at the tactical level, decision makers need more aggregated information, sorted and tallied in different ways, to monitor success and plan next steps. The business intelligence that executives need to make better decisions is often less structured in strategic levels than at the operational or even management level. Top-level executives certainly need summary and historical data from the company's own transactional systems and data warehouses. But they also need competitive business intelligence about their rivals, broader information about the industry landscape, and a forecast of overall economic and business conditions.
________ decisions affect the organization and beyond and are guided by the leadership of the organization towards a long-term strategy.
Strategic
________ is a discovery process which relies on semantic structures, linguistic relationships, and common phrases to extract meaningful information.
Text mining
Discuss how dashboards, portals, and mashups support the decision making process.
The IT dashboard is a graphical user interface that organizes and summarizes information vital to the user's role and the decisions that the user makes. Portals are gateways that provide access to a variety of relevant information from many different sources on one screen. They are content aggregators, making it easier for users to view and drill down into company dashboards, weather announcements, news, traffic reports, stock reports, to-do lists, e-mail, and discussion groups. A newer approach to aggregating content from multiple internal and external sources on customizable web pages is the mashup. This approach relies on Web 2.0 technologies and programming standards such as XML to blend content and updated feeds from various inside and outside sources in flexible ways.
What are the different processes that are used to analyze patterns, trends, and relationships in data mining?
The different types of processes that are used to analyze patterns, trends, and relationships are the goal seeking analysis, market basket analysis, text mining, forecasting, optimization, and what-if analysis. The market basket analysis looks for relationships to reveal customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items. Text mining on the other hand, is a variation of data mining, and refers to a discovery process in which unstructured text information is the source of business intelligence, rather than structured data. A what-if analysis builds a model that establishes relationships between many variables and then changes some of the variables to see how the others are affected. Goal seeking analysis is similar to what-if analysis, but in reverse. It is a process which allows the user to set a target value for a particular metric and tell the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal. Forecasting tools analyze historical and seasonal trends and then take into account existing and predicted business conditions to estimate some variable of interest, such as customer demand or projected revenue.
Which of the following statements is true of portals?
They are gateways that provide access to a variety of relevant information from many different sources on one screen.
Which of the following is a characteristic of decisions made at an organization's strategic level?
They have widespread effects which impact suppliers, customers, and the whole industry.
Which of the following is a characteristic of neural nets?
They mimic the way a human brain works.
Which of the following is an accurate definition of text mining?
a discovery process in which unstructured text information is the source of business intelligence
Which of the following best describes an IT dashboard?
a graphical user interface that organizes information vital to a user's role and decisions
Which of the following is an accurate definition of a mashup?
an approach to aggregating content from multiple sources on customizable web pages
Which of the following is a function of forecasting?
analyzing seasonal trends to predict the future using statistical decision support tools
________ are used by infomediaries to retrieve current product prices from different vendors.
bots
Jonathan, a systems manager at the Unisun Bank of New Jersey, is asked to look into the problem of information overload on the bank's operational systems. Which of the following actions would best help Jonathan get the systems to work faster and prevent information overload?
building a data warehouse optimized for complex queries
Escapade Holidays is a travel house in New Jersey which recently created a website to attract travel clientele for the company. It is vital that the company is able to track time spent on each page by visitors, which will help them understand destinations and offers the customers are interested in. Which of the following will best help them understand customer behavior patterns as well as the URL the visitor just left?
clickstream data
The term ________ refers to every single click by every visitor, along with associated data revealing customer behavior patterns, such as time spent on the page, the URL the visitor just left, and the visitor's IP address.
clickstream data
In e-commerce metrics, ________ refers to the amount an advertiser pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad to navigate to the advertiser's site.
cost per clickthrough
A ________ is a graphical user interface that organizes and summarizes information vital to the user's role and the decisions that user makes.
dashboard
The process of understanding trends and patterns within the business intelligence that a firm has collected is known as ________.
data mining
Johanna wishes to enrol for Freemail!'s email service. Which of the following would best help Freemail! establish that Johanna is not a software bot?
enter a sequence of letters and numbers from an image
At the operational level, decision makers need more aggregated information, sorted and tallied in different ways, to monitor success and plan next steps compared to those at the strategic level.
false
Companies use intelligent agents to extract useful business intelligence from private inaccessible Web sites.
false
Decisions made at the operational level involve long-term strategy and are undertaken by the leaders of the organization.
false
Stickiness refers to how frequently users move from one related site to another.
false
Which of the following is a function of online analytical processing?
helping organizations spot suspicious activity
Which of the following is stickiness a measure of?
how long visitors remain at a particular site
The term ________ refers to quantifiable metrics used to evaluate an organization or an individual's success in a particular activity in which it is engaged.
key performance indicators
Shirley Yearwood is an analyst at a retail outlet and is required to assess customer data to understand buying patterns of customers when they purchase multiple items. What analysis process will best help her to analyze purchasing habits of customers who bought gum boots along with umbrellas, ties along with shirts, and hair clips along with headbands among other related products?
market basket analysis
Which of the following is a statistical technique that reveals customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items?
market basket analysis
Sam Reid is a web designer at a publishing firm in Minnesota where he is currently using a process to aggregate a wide array of information like book reviews, customer feedback, awards won, and company details on its public website. Which of the following is he using to bring together all this information from multiple internal and external sources onto the company's customizable web pages?
mashup
The term ________ refers to an approach to aggregating content from internal and external sources on customizable web pages that relies on Web 2.0 technologies.
mashup
Which of the following best describes tactical-level decisions?
mid-level decisions undertaken by managers on issues like product development and membership drives
Which of the following characteristics would make service robots suitable for use in rescue operations?
mobile
James Wood, who works in the marketing department of the Whistlewoods hotel, has been given the responsibility of identifying patterns in the preferences of guests who have repeatedly visited the hotel in the past ten years. Which of the following would best help him categorize the massive amounts of data to reveal preferences of guests, such as type of suite, room service, etc.?
online analytical processing
Which of the following methods categorizes massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends in the data?
online analytical processing
Clara Thomas is an employee at the Citizens Bank, the largest bank in Texas. What type of decisions will she undertake if her responsibilities include receiving customer queries, fixing appointments for sales representatives of the bank, and tracking potential clients through call records?
operational decisions
Business intelligence is said to be used at the ________ if companies use it to bring meaningful, performance-related information to all employees.
operational level
Which of the following best describes an operational-level decision?
programmed decisions that deal directly with customers
Which of the following best describes the term key performance indicator?
quantifiable metrics most important to the individual's role and the organization's success
Which of the following is an accurate definition of online analytical processing?
retrieving, examining, and drilling data into specific groups
Which level of decision making does the executive information system support?
strategic
Jane Adams is a director at Wilderness, a travel house in Manhattan. What type of decision does she take in opening another branch of the company in Chicago?
strategic-level decision
Grey Thompson is the largest advertising firm in Washington. What level of decision making would Josh Lucas, a marketing manager, be involved in if he undertakes decisions on promotional campaigns, guerilla marketing, and brand awareness?
tactical
People at ________ levels in an organization draw on business intelligence to make decisions related to marketing plans, product development, and departmental budgets.
tactical
Which of the following best describes keyword advertising?
text ads that appear as sponsored links along with the results of a particular word search in a search engine
The term "artificial intelligence" describes ________.
the capability of machines that can mimic human intelligence
Which of the following is an accurate definition of a top-landing page?
the number of entrances to a site for each page
Which of the following is an accurate definition of the web metric "unique visitors"?
the number of first time visitors to a site
In web metrics, which of the following best describes depth of visit?
the number of page views per visit
Which of the following is an accurate definition of conversion rate?
the ratio of visitors who complete some activity divided by the total number of visitors
An executive information system refers to the software tools that support strategic-level decision making for senior managers.
true
Clickstream data refers to every single click by every visitor, along with associated data revealing customer behavior.
true
Data warehouses offer an opportunity to combine the data housed in separate systems into one and then load it to a database optimized for complex queries.
true
OLAP systems achieve their speed and their slice-and-dice capabilities by building multidimensional data cubes.
true
Optimization is an extension of goal seeking, in which a user can change many variables to reach some maximum or minimum target, as long as the changes stay within the constraints the user identifies.
true
Text mining, which monitors web chatter, helps in managing customer relationships and spotting crises early.
true
The market basket analysis examines relationships to reveal customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items.
true
The online analytical processing system allows users to slice and dice massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends.
true
Which of the following is a function of market basket analysis?
understanding behavior patterns of customers as they buy multiple items
A standardized and regularly updated output from a publisher that can be embedded in a customized mashup is known as a ________.
web feed
