COB 204: Chapter 5 Business Intelligence and Decision Making Support

What is OLAP?

A BI application involves "slicing and dicing" data stored in a dimensional format, drilling down in the data to greater detail and aggregating the data. (Multidimensional analysis capabilities)

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

A broad category of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions.

What is decision making?

A choice among two or more alternatives that individuals and groups make.

What is management?

A process by which an organization achieves its goals through the use of resources (inputs).

What is Management Science?

A structured decisions prescribed solutions have been developed

What is what-if analysis?

Attempts to predict the impact of a change in the assumptions (input data) on the proposed solution.

What is the difference between BI and BA (Business Analytics)?

BI should be devided into quering, reporting, online analytical processing, and business analytics. BA is a subset of BI based on statistics, prediction, and optimization

What is a Decision Support System (DSS)?

Combine models and data to analyze semi-structured problems and some unstructured problems that involve extensive user involvement.

Why do organizations need BI?

Enable decision makers to quickly ascertain the status of a business enterprise by examining key information.

What are the phases of decision making?

Intelligence Phase Design Phase Choice Phase

What are three broad categories of decisions in management?

Interpersonal roles Information roles Decisional roles

What are the types of decisions based on complexity of problems?

Operational control Management control Strategic planning

What is goal-seeking analysis?

Represent a "backward" solution approach. It attempts to calculate the value of the inputs necessary to achieve a desired level of output.

What is a model?

Simplified representations, or abstractions, of reality.

What is Operations Research?

The application of scientific principles to business management, providing a quantitative basis for complex decisions

What is data mining?

The process of searching for valuable business information in a large database, data warehouse, or data mart. Predicting trends and behaviors Identifying previously unknown patterns

What is sensitivity analysis?

The study of the impact that changes in one or more parts of a decision-making have on other parts. Examine the impact that changes in input variables have on output variables.