latrobe.edu.

au

Principles of Business Analytics

BUS5PB, Lecture 1
(S1, 2024)

La Trobe University CRICOS Provider Code Number 00115M

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Teaching team
• Dr. Binh Tran
Subject Coordinator
(e: [email protected])

• Mr. Rohan Sehgal

Academic Tutor
(e: [email protected])

• Mr. Vishal Chauhan

Academic Tutor
(e: [email protected])
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Dr. Binh Tran

• Data Analytics & AI expert

• Over 20 years of teaching experience in computer science, coupled with 6 years of

immersion in data and analytics.

• Research interests are directed towards the ethical and effective implementation of
artificial intelligence and machine learning in business environments.
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Rohan

• Insights Manager at CVGT

o Product Owner – Data and Analytics

o Data Architecture and Data Strategy Leadership Service Coach for operational
analytics, performance management and business analysis

• Service coach for operational analytics, performance management and business

analysis

• Research Interests – Thesis in robust irrigation recommendation systems for

precision irrigation, IIoT, 5G
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Vishal
• Lead Data Integration Consultant at Capgemini

• Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology

and engineering services.

• “Capgemini invent” - design and consulting

• 5 years of industry experience in data and analytics, focusing on solution co-

development with industry B2B stakeholders

• Worked on advanced analytics platforms such as Dell-Boomi atmosphere iPaaS,

SAP, Pronto, Oracle and, Apache Cassandra
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Subject Housekeeping

La Trobe University CRICOS Provider Code Number 00115M

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Housekeeping

• All resources will be published via the LMS

• This subject will be live-streamed with recordings available online 48 hours

after the class finishes

• No examination but 1 quiz and 3 assignments

• Get the latest subject schedule online and note key dates for this subject
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Subject protocols

• In-class sessions which are live stream via Zoom

• Recording available on the LMS

• Consultation: book via email to Vishal ([email protected])

• Standard policy applies to extensions, academic misconduct (plagiarism,

collusion), etc.
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Subject protocols

• Questions:

• If about subject content, please use the discussion forum on LMS

• Work together as a cohort and answer other people’s questions if

you can – teaching team will be monitoring

• For admin matters, please email Binh Tran([email protected])

• Please check your student email account regularly and the

announcements on LMS
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Assessment

• Quiz 1 (10%)

• Assignment 1 (20%): Self-serve analytics solution development

• Assignment 2 (40%): Descriptive analytics application

• Assignment 3 (30%): Ethics, privacy and security in data analytics

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Assessment

• Quiz 1 (10%)

• Assignment 1 (20%): Self-serve analytics solution development

• Assignment 2 (40%): Descriptive analytics application

• Assignment 3 (30%): Ethics, privacy and security in data analytics

 latrobe.edu.au

Assessment

• Quiz 1 (10%)

• Assignment 1 (20%): Self-serve analytics solution development

• Assignment 2 (40%): Descriptive analytics application

• Assignment 3 (30%): Ethics, privacy and security in data analytics

 latrobe.edu.au

Assessment

• Quiz 1 (10%)

• Assignment 1 (20%): Self-serve analytics solution development

• Assignment 2 (40%): Descriptive analytics application

• Assignment 3 (40%): Ethics, privacy and security in data analytics

 latrobe.edu.au

Assessment

• Quiz 1 (10%)

• Assignment 1 (20%): Self-serve analytics solution development

• Assignment 2 (40%): Descriptive analytics application

• Assignment 3 (30%): Ethics, privacy and security in data analytics

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Assessment extensions

• Assignment extensions and special consideration cases must be submitted

formally via the university's online systems (please refer to the subject
learning guide on LMS)

• Assignments submitted after the due date without an approved extension will
incur a late penalty (5% penalty per day late)
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Subject Schedule
BUS5PB Principles of Business Analytics S1 – 2024 (Tentative)

Week​ Thu. Date​ Lecture​ Hands-on Activities Assignment Schedule​

1​ 7-Mar-24​ Introduction to Business Analytics​
Digital Transformation and Analytics
2​ 14-Mar-24​ Software Setting up
in Organisations​
MS Excel 365 - Data Visualisation &
3​ 21-Mar-24​ First Tools in Analytics​ Assignment 1 Release​
Power Pivot
4​ 28-Mar-24 No Lecture​ Power BI Case Study​ Quiz Due
Break​ 4-Apr-24 Semester Break​
5​ 11-Apr-24​​ Descriptive Analytics (Part 1)​ Statistical Concepts (Part 1)​ Assignment 1 Due​
6​ 18- Apr-24​​ Descriptive Analytics (Part 2)​ Statistical Concepts (Part 2)​ Assignment 2 Release​
7 25- Apr-24 Advanced Analytics with Excel​
8 2-May-24 Data Ethics and Privacy​ Overflow From Week 7 if any​
9 ​9-May-24 Cyber, Data and IT Security​ Mini Workshop on Security​ Assignment 2 Due​
​10 ​16-May-24 SAS Workshop​ Assignment 3 Release​
​11 ​23-May-24​ Guest Lecture​
​12​ ​30- May-24 Cloud Technologies​
13​ 6-Jun-24 Assignment 3 Due​
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BUS5PB Subject Outlines

• Examine the purpose of analytics within a business environment, and
describe the importance, technologies and implementation issues of business
analytics.

• Analyse and evaluate the function of key elements of a typical analytics

solution; the architecture, data management, data analytics, reports and
dashboards, as well as the role of management and end-users.

• Recognise the requirements, methodologies and technologies for analytics-

based business performance management.

• Understand the ethics, privacy and security issues in relation to data

analytics.
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BUS5PB Software
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Recommended readings

• Stubbs, E. (2011). The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability (1st Edition).
• Provost, F. and Fawcett, T. (2013). Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data
Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking (1st Edition).
• Sharda, R., Delen, D. and Turban, E. (2017), Business Intelligence, Analytics and Data Science: A
Managerial Perspective (4th Edition).
• Davenport, T. H. and Harris, J. G. (2017). Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
(Revised Edition).
• Few, S. (2019). The Data Loom: Weaving Understanding by Thinking Critically and Scientifically with
Data.
• Evans, J. R. (2020). Business Analytics: Methods, Models and Decisions (3rd Edition).
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Why are the readings “recommended”?

• None of the textbooks are “prescribed” because,

• Business Analytics encompasses several fields of study with selective

contributions from each field towards addressing organisational problems

• Business Analytics can be leveraged for strategic, tactical and operational

requirements of an organisation

• Business Analytics is an evolving discipline with continuous and frequent

updates from industry, academia, and professional associations.

• The fast-paced innovation and translation of research into practice requires a

similarly agile approach for knowledge dissemination
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Learning objectives

• Defining business analytics

• Types of analytics
• Deriving values
• Business Analytics Lifecycle
• Real-world success stories
• Challenges in analytics

[ https://www.slanecartoon.com/ ]
 Topic 1: Introduction
to Business Analytics

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Motivation How satisfied our

customers on our
Which product has products and services?
the highest sales?

Which are our

highest/lowest margin
What impact will new products customers?
have on the revenue?

What is our forecasted

Where can we
revenue growth?
improve our profits?
Which product promotion
campaigns lead to higher revenue
Source
and margins?
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Why study Business Analytics? Expanding market

• Global revenue in BI and analytics market is forecast to reach $18.3 billion in 2017, an
increase of 7.3 percent from 2016, and forecasted to grow to $22.8 billion by 2020 (Gartner)
• https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2017-02-17-gartner-says-
worldwide-business-intelligence-and-analytics-market-to-reach-18-billion-in-2017

• Revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from $130 billion by the end of 2016 to
$203 billion by 2020 — a compound growth rate of 11.7%” (IDC)
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2017/01/20/6-predictions-for-the-203-billion-big-
data-analytics-market/#7cbb72682083

• “The State of Data, June 2021" (Forbes)

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2021/07/05/the-state-of-data-june-2021/
• https://techjury.net/blog/big-data-statistics/

• “Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century” (Harvard Business Review)

Job opportunities
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Why the sudden demand?

“Big data is high-volume, velocity and variety information assets
that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information
processing for enhanced insight and decision making” (Gartner)

The Four V's

• Volume: terabytes to zettabytes.
• Velocity: speed of data input and output, also
about the rate of change — linking datasets
at different frequencies.
• Variety: varied sources of data,
structured/unstructured, clickstream, text,
emoji, multimedia.
• Veracity: uncertainty of data (data quality).
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The future of data

[ Source: Raconteur (2019) ]

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What is business analytics?

“Business Analytics is the process of transforming data into insights that support,
improve, and/or automate business decisions.”
— The ORATER project (2013 in UK)
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Business analytics definitions

Gartner Inc.
• Business analytics is comprised of solutions used to build analysis models and simulations
to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states.
• Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and
statistics, and is delivered as an application suitable for a business user.

IBM Corp.
• Business analytics is a set of automated data analysis practices, tools and services that help
you understand both what is happening in your business and why, to improve decision-
making and help you plan for the future.

NGDATA
• The study of data through statistical and operations analysis, the formation of predictive
models, application of optimisation techniques and the communication of these results to
customers, business partners and colleague executives.
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Business analytics definitions (more)

[ Source: Power et al. (2018) ]

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A More Formal Analytics

Holsapple et al (2014) articulate a BA foundation in terms of 3 dimensions, 6 classes of
perspectives, and a unifying framework.

BA phenomena are seen as occurring in a three- Orientation: The direction of thought, that transcends
dimensional space of domain, orientation, and across all domains.
technique. (Holsapple et al 2014)
What analytics does:
Domain: subject fields and sub-fields in which
aspects of analytics are being applied – Descriptive analytics, Predictive analytics and
Prescriptive analytics (A three-fold taxonomy
– Financial analytics introduced in 2010 by Capgemini)

– Risk analytics What is made by an analytics effort:

– Marketing (or customer) analytics - sub-field – SPED taxonomy - Sense of a Situation, make
can be retail analytics Predictions, make Evaluations, or make Decisions

– Human resources (or talent) analytics What are the benefits of analytics:

– Web analytics – PAIR model - Productivity, Agility, Innovation, and

Reputation
– Social media analytics

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A More Formal Analytics

Technique: How are analytics tasks planned, executed and delivered?
– Can be technology-based, practice-based or both
– Quantitative techniques – correlation, regression, chi square
– Qualitative techniques – surveys, observations, focus groups
– Visual analytics and dashboards – graphs, heat maps, VR
– Data warehousing – OLAP, reports
– Data mining – classification, clustering
– Text mining – occurrence (VSM), ontology, NLP
–…

– There’s also a data perspective - structured, semi-structured and unstructured

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A More Formal Analytics

Holsapple et al (2014) six classes of perspective:
1. A Movement: involving a mindset where evidence-based problem recognition and solving
governs an entity's strategies, operations, and tactics.
2. A Collection of Practices & Technologies – set of methodologies, tools, and technologies
that enable the analysis of business data.
3. A Transformation Process – a systemic process that transforms raw data into actionable
insights or decisions.
4. A Capability Set - collection of competencies or skills within an organization.
5. Specific Activities – actions that manipulate and operate on data. Examples include data
acquisition, examination, aggregation, analysis, and interpretation.
6. A Decisional Paradigm – an approach or philosophy underlining the decision-making
process. A BA decisional paradigm is grounded in data and analytical reasoning instead
of experience, anecdotes and guesses.

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Holsapple et al framework
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To be successful, BA initiatives should ensure the

interconnected nature of these components and
their coherence and mutual reinforcement:

• Nurturing an analytics movement

• Building and growing a managed set of

analytics capabilities

• Designing analytics processes for transforming

evidence into insights, decisions, and actions

• Conducting specific evidence-manipulation

activities needed within an analytics initiative

• Executing analytics practices and technologies

• Adopting a decisional paradigm that stresses

analytics

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Why Business Analytics?

Rationale for business analytics (Holsapple et al 2014)
– Achieve a competitive advantage
– Support an organisation’s strategic and tactical goals
– Better organisational performance
– Better decision outcomes
– Better or more informed decision processes
– Knowledge production
– Obtaining value from data
 Topic 2: Types of
Analytics

35
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Type of analytics
• Descriptive analytics
• What happened?
• Diagnostic analytics
• Why it happened?
• Predictive analytics
• What might happen?
• Prescriptive analytics
• What should we do?
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Type of analytics: Example

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Business analytics terms

• Business Intelligence
• Data Science
Computer Maths &
• Big Data Science Statistics
Business
• Data Mining Analytics

• Knowledge Discovery
Business
• Forecasting Domain

• Machine Learning (and Deep Learning)

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History of analytics
• 1940: Kerrison Predictor — a computerised anti-aircraft fire control system
• 1950: Manhattan Project — Monte Carlo simulation to predict nuclear chain reactions
• 1950: First computerised weather forecast models
• 1958: FICO’s use of predictive modelling to assess credit risk (FICO score)
• 1979: Visicalc — the first commercial tool for model-based decision support (DSS)
• 1980 onwards: Structured data, databases, EIS, data warehouses
• 1980 onwards: Office automation, digitisation of business functions
Emergence of BI
• 2000 onwards: Structured and unstructured data — social media, big data, multimedia
• 2000 onwards: Digitisation of personal information and behaviours
 Topic 3: Deriving
Business Value

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Deriving business values

To generate values, Business Analytics must …
• Be purposeful
• Deliver new insights
• Be dynamic and actionable

“Business analytics should go beyond plain analytics,

requiring a clear relevancy to business, a resulting insight that
will be implementable and actionable, and performance and
value measurement capabilities to ensure a successful
business result.” (Stubbs, 2011)
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Business Analytics: Purpose

• Align with business functions

• Align with knowledge of the person taking action
• Address management objectives and issues
(strategy, performance, compliance, risk)
• Derive real value from the ideas generated through
conversations by closely investigating information
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Business Analytics: Insights

• Discover new factors or information

• Create awareness of facts previously unknown
• Surface cause-effect information
• Enable future-looking decision-making
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Business Analytics: Dynamic and actionable

• Support decision-making and action-taking

• Improve discovery and insight, determination and
resolve, innovation and creativity
• Lead to actions that integrate well with
organisational processes
• Initiate actions that improve or generate revenue
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Data, Information, Insight and Action

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Data, Information, Insight

• Data: Raw and unprocessed facts that are usually in the form of numbers and text —
quantitative (measured) or qualitative (observed).
• Information: Prepared data that has been processed, aggregated and organised into a
more human-friendly format that provides more context — data visualisations, reports
and dashboards.
• Insight: Generated by analysing information and drawing conclusions — influence
decisions and drive changes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Alignment
• In line with business goals and/or strategic initiatives
• Linked to KPI’s
• Connected to a lever the business can act on

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Context
• Make comparisons — Good versus Bad / Past versus Predicted
• Benchmark against known metrics

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Relevance
• Know your audience
• Place your insights where your audience is
• Show your insights how your audience likes to see them
• Share your insights when your audience can absorb them

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Specificity
• Describe what your insight is, and
• What is isn't
• Explain why it happened

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Novelty
• Come from a unique perspective or a different angle
• First-mover advantage
• Peak curiosity and challenge beliefs (carefully)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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What makes insights actionable?

Clarity
• Visualisation and storytelling can make it clearer, but …
• Insights can get lost in the shiny, sexy new pictures
• Articulate exactly what action to take, how and when

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-business-value/#7dab4d5451e5
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Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics

• Business intelligence mainly focuses on descriptive analytics

• BI provides a overview of historical and present data to show what has happened or
what is currently happening

• BI answers the questions “what” and “how” so you can replicate what works and
change what does not

• Business analytics focuses on predictive analytics

• Business analytics uses data mining, modelling, machine learning and deep learning
to determine the likelihood of future outcomes and predictions

• BA answers the question “why” so it can provide predictions about what will happen
Source
 Topic 4: The Analytics
Lifecycle

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An analytics approach
Structure the problem Analyse the problem

Define the problem Quantitative analysis

Summarise and Draw Make

Identify the variables evaluate conclusions Decisions

Collect the data Qualitative analysis

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Requirement of a standard approach

• The data mining process must be reliable and repeatable by people with
little data mining background.

• A standard framework is required for recording experience

• Allows projects to be replicated
• Aids in project planning and management
• As a “comfort factor” for new adopters — demonstrates the maturity of
data mining

CRoss-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM)

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CRISP-DM
• CRISP-DM is an open standard
data mining process model.
• Conceived in 1996, by five leading
European organisations in data
mining, later acquired by IBM
• CRISP-DM 2.0 was proposed in
2008 and in 2015 IBM released
ASUM-DM, but neither was widely
adopted.
• Despite being from the “data
mining” era, it is widely used as it is
goal-directed and process-driven
Source:
• Chapman et al. (2000) CRISP-DM 1.0 Step-by-Step Data Mining Guide
• Martínez-Plumed, Fernando, et al. "CRISP-DM twenty years later: From data mining processes to data science
trajectories." IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2019).
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CRISP-DM: Goals and Benefits

CRISP-DM aims to: CRISP-DM should be:
• Ensure quality of knowledge discovery • General purpose — i.e. stable
project results across varying applications
• Reduce skills required for knowledge • Robust — i.e. insensitive to
discovery changes in the environment
• Reduce costs and time • Tool and technique independent
• Support documentation of projects • Tool supportable
• Capture experience for reuse
• Support knowledge transfer and
training
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CRISP-DM: Phases
1. Business understanding: understand the problem to be solved — often need to recast the
problem when designing a solution (as cycles within a cycle).
• With an element of creativity, what exactly do we want to do? How exactly would we do
it? What requires analytical models? Loop back and adjust to better reflect the actual
business need.

2. Data understanding: understand the strengths and limitations of the data because rarely is
there an exact match with the problem. Estimate the costs and benefits of each data source.
• Discover the structure of the business problem and the data that are available, and then
match them to one or more analytics activities.

3. Data preparation: largely driven by the analytics techniques as they require data to be in a
form different to its natural form.
• Converting data to tabular format, removing or inferring missing values, and converting
data to different types. Handling unstructured data — text, images, video. Integrating
different data sources.
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CRISP-DM: Phases
4. Modelling: actual application of analytics techniques — descriptive (summarise),
predictive (predict/forecast) and prescriptive (action the future).
• Output of this phase is some sort of model or pattern capturing regularities in the
data. A large number of techniques and methods.

5. Evaluation: assess results and insights rigorously to gain confidence that they are
valid and reliable before actual use in business strategy. Need to establish models
and patterns extracted from the data are true regularities and not just idiosyncrasies or
sample anomalies.
• Also used to ensure that the model satisfies original business goals. This includes
both quantitative and qualitative assessments. Models and outcomes need to be
comprehensible to stakeholders.
6. Deployment: models, outcomes or the techniques are put into real use in order to
realise some return on investment.
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CRISP-DM: Phases
The outer circle in the diagram
symbolises the cyclic nature of the data
mining process itself.
• A data mining process continues after
a solution has been deployed.
• The lessons learned during the
process can trigger new, often more
focused business questions.
• Subsequent data mining processes
will benefit from the experience of
previous ones.
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CRISP-DM: Phases and Tasks

[ Source: Chapman et al. (2020) CRISP-DM 1.0 Step-by-Step Data Mining Guide ]
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CRISP-DM Task: Determine data mining goals

• A business goal states objectives in business terminology; a data mining goal states
project objectives in technical terms.
• For example, the business goal might be — “Increase catalog sales to existing
customers.”
• A data mining goal might be — “Predict how many products a customer will buy,
given their purchases over the past three years, relevant demographic information,
and the price of the product.”
• Activities:
• Translate the business questions to data mining goals — e.g. a marketing
campaign requires segmentation of customers in order to decide whom to
approach in this campaign; the level/size of the segments should be specified.
• Specify the data mining problem type — e.g. classification, prediction, clustering,
etc.
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CRISP-DM: Modeling

What is a model?
• Input -> Process -> Output

Data Analytics Insights

All analytics can be represented as:

Outcomei = Modeli + Errori

Outcomei = ( b0 + b1 Predictori ) + Errori

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CRISP-DM: Sins?
Scrum
Sin 1
• Sin 1: Lack of clarity and changes in
business objectives
Sin 4
• Sin 2: Data driven iteration rather than Sin 3
business driven
• Sin 3: Blind trust in IT in deployment
• Sin 4: Poor adaptivity — dying models Sin 2

when patterns and business changes

• Solution: Agile!
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Other Analytics Approaches

• To name a few…

• TDSP – Team Data Science Process

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/data-science-process/overview

• SAS Analytics Lifecycle

• https://blogs.sas.com/content/hiddeninsights/2013/10/11/how-well-are-you-managing-the-
analytical-life-cycle/

• KNIME analytics lifecycle

• https://www.knime.com/blog/the-data-science-life-cycle-a-new-standard
 Topic 5: Applications,
Successes and Examples

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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition Which residents in a postcode should receive a
coupon in the mail for a new store location?
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty What advertising strategy best elicits positive
sentiment toward the brand?
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
What is the best next product for this customer?
• Cross-sell / up-sell What other products is this customer likely to purchase?
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
How many 75-inch OLED TVs should be in stock?
• Supply optimisation (Too many is expensive; too few is loss of revenue.)

• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
What weekly revenue increase can be expected
• Financial forecasting
after the Valentine's Day sale?
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
Will oatmeal sell better near granola bars or near
• Product placement baby food?
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
Which customers are most likely to switch to a
• Churn analysis different wireless provider in the next six months?
• Fraud detection
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Areas where analytics are often used …

• New customer acquisition
• Customer loyalty
• Cross-sell / up-sell
• Supply optimisation
• Financial forecasting
• Product placement
• Churn analysis
• Fraud detection How can I identify a fraudulent transaction?
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Success stories: Banking

Westpac
• Implemented the 360-degree view of their customers, KnowMe.
• Capturing and centralising customer activities — such as ATM usage and call centre interaction
from 12 million customers.
• Customers are matched with new programs or offers based on behavioral analysis of this Big
Data set.
• Increase of 25% in customer engagement.

CBA — HR
• Uses predictive analytics to create advocacy from within the HR function itself.
• HR has successfully shifted from operational metrics to strategic and predictive analytics.
• Which employees are most likely to resign? How are resignations and performance
related?
• Determining factors leading to patterned sick leave on a Monday!
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Success stories: Hospitality

Carnival Cruises
• Owns 100 ships and nine brands
• Passenger behaviors, vacation trends and queries from travel agents and potential
customers online and by phone are used to dynamically price cruises on each ship and
figure out which demographic to market seats.

Qantas Loyalty
• Originally the marketing department at Qantas — started building customer datasets from
2017.
• A 360-degree view of customer behaviour, preferences and psychographics.
• Initial disruptive changes based on insights gained: redeem points outside of airline seats,
partnering with the banking industry and other businesses (such as Woolworths).
• Now generates $1.3 billion in revenue, and captures 800,000 unique member opinions
annually.
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Success stories: Manufacturing

Rolls Royce
• Manufactures high-end engines for airplanes and ships.
• All engines and propulsion systems are fitted with hundreds of sensors which record each
operation and report any changes in real-time.
• Rolls Royce uses analytics and Big Data processes in three key areas of its operations —
design, manufacture, and after-sales support.
• Design generates tens of terabytes of data on each simulation of a jet engine.
• Manufacturing a fan blade generates half a terabyte of data on each individual blade.
They manufacture 6000 fan blades a year which is three petabytes of data on just
one component.
• Maintenance can predicted days or weeks ahead of time. Customers are charged per
hour for use of engines, with all of the servicing costs underwritten by Rolls Royce.
[ Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/06/01/how-big-data-drives-success-at-rolls-royce/#419b0a071d69 ]
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Success stories: Automobile

Ford Motor Company
• Leveraged social media platforms for marketing to create brand awareness and drive
product sales.
• Months before the US launch of its Fiesta subcompact, Ford Motor Company lent early
models of these cars to 100 people recognised as social media “influencers” and asked
them to share their observations online.
• YouTube videos related to this campaign
generated over 6.5 million views.
• Ford received more than 50,000 requests for
information; and when the car was finally
released in the US, 10,000 cars were sold in
the first six days.
[Source: https://hbr.org/2010/01/ford-recently-wrapped-the-firs ]
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Challenges in analytics

• Quality of data (lots of cleansing required)

• Data is more unstructured these days (versus structured data)
• Volume of data is growing very fast (with the surge of technological devices
and platforms, IoT)
• Poor business processes (garbage in -> garbage out)
• Privacy (trade-off between utility and privacy)
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References
• Power, D. J., Heavin, C., McDermott, J. and Daly, M. (2018). Defining Business Analytics: An Empirical Approach,
Journal of Business Analytics 1(1), pp. 40–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/2573234X.2018.1507605
• Dykes, B. (2016). Actionable Insights: The Missing Link Between Data and Business Value.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/04/26/actionable-insights-the-missing-link-between-data-and-
business-value/#7dab4d5451e5, last accessed on 18 July 2021.
• Dykes, B. (2016). Data Storytelling: The Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/03/31/data-storytelling-the-essential-data-science-skill-everyone-
needs/#262635fb52ad, last accessed on 18 July 2021.
• Gartner (2020). Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021.
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2021/, last accessed on 18
July 2021.
• Davenport, T. H. and Patil, D. J. (2012). Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.
https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century, last accessed on 18 July 2021.
• Hudson (2019). Data Analytics Salary Guide by Hudson Analytics.
https://au.hudson.com/analytics-salary-guide-2019, last accessed on 18 July 2021.
• Petrov, C. (2021). Impressive Big Data Statistics 2021.
https://techjury.net/blog/big-data-statistics/, last accessed on 18 July 2021.
 Thank you
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