Reference no: EM134023139 , Length: 1000 Words

Data Analytics in Business, Assessment - Business Report

Learning Outcomes

Examine theoretical concepts and principles for managing data and its business application.

c) Critically evaluate the value chain for converting data into analytics outcomes by clearly communicating business value to stakeholders.

Assessment Task

Critically evaluate data use cases that apply to solving a business problem and achieving valuable analytics outcomes. In this assessment, you will critically analyse a business problem, identify relevant data and analysis techniques to solve that problem, and locate resources to perform the analysis. The submission will include a business report with a dataset. To prepare for this assessment, read the Essential Resources from Modules 1.1 to 2.1. These resources introduce you to data, data types, identifying data use cases, data collection, and asking key business questions.

Context

To execute a successful data strategy, businesses must identify their goals, locate appropriate data sources, and develop appropriate use cases (e.g., customer sentiment analysis, behavioural analytics, predictive analytics, etc.) for solving the goals. Assessment 1 will demonstrate your understanding of these first steps required to execute data strategy, which are important skills for businesses and data analysts to master. To align business goals with valuable data analytics solutions, key business questions and associated data exploration tasks must be grasped: the data types, their usage, and their impact on business goals.

Instructions

Produce a Business Report of 1,000 words that identifies: a business problem and associated goals; a dataset; data types; and use cases for addressing the goals.

Step 1: Identify a business problem and state at least three (3) strategic business goals to address that problem. To better understand what is needed for this assessment, please refer to the examples listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Business problem mapped to at least three (3) strategic goals

No   Problem   Strategic Goals
1   Sales of Product X are below expectations
Improve Product X's market share by 50%.
Grow Product X's revenue by 10% year-on-year.
Achieve customer satisfaction scores of 90% or higher via improved service delivery.
Reduce the percentage of returned Products by 5%.

2   Employee retention is poor
Achieve engagement scores of 80% or higher to retain motivated, productive, and satisfied employees.
Keep number of employees at or above prior years' levels.
Improve workplace safety.

A key challenge of Assessment 1 is aligning a business problem and identified goals with appropriate data types and analytics techniques. Importantly, your problem and corresponding goals must befit data analytics solutions (e.g., a problem or opportunity with goals that can be achieved via data analysis). Although you are free to identify a business problem, selecting a significant business problem requiring deep analysis is likely to be rewarded with higher grades.

Step 2: Select an appropriate data set.

Note: For practical purposes, steps 1 and 2 may be completed in different sequences: you may start by selecting an appropriate data set and then identifying a business problem that the data set could solve or vice versa.

Table 2: Possible sources to obtain datasets

No   Source   Description
1   Kaggle Datasets
2   UCI Machine Learning Repository – This website is popular among students and teachers in the USA.
3   Google Dataset Search – This is a Google search engine for publicly available datasets hosted across various Internet sources.
4   Datahub – This is a collection of datasets in healthcare, education, finance, property and many other industries.
5   Data.gov – This website contains all the USA's government public datasets.
6   Others – Government websites include the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and NASDAQ.
Note: You may need to register an account for some of these government websites to gain access to their datasets.
7   Nominate your own – You can nominate a real-world data set from your workplace or any other business. Please inform your Learning Facilitators if this is the case and find out if any permission requests are needed or confidentiality agreements are in place.

Step 3: List key business questions associated with addressing a business problem and achieving business goal(s).

For example, answering the questions listed below could help with achieving the business goal to "improve Product X's market share by 50%" (e.g., business problem number 1 and the first goal listed in Table 1).

Who are the company's main competitors?
What factors make customers buy Product X?
Will customer experience improve by adding a new payment option such as a pay wallet?

Step 4: Identify data types to collect and process for analysing a business problem and providing solutions for achieving business goals.

Product Data
Sales Data
Customer Data

Step 5: Map the publicly available data to the business goal(s).

The examples listed in Table 3 map business goals to specific data types. For example, "product data" that is publicly available can be mapped to the goal, "improve Product X's market share by 50%" (e.g., see Goal number 1 and the corresponding Data Types listed in Table 3 above).

Table 3: Goals and corresponding data types

No   Business Goal   Data Type
1   Improve Product X's market share by 50%   Product data, sales data, and campaign data, etc.
2   Provide quality service to customers   Customer data, reviews, and support service data, etc.

Step 6: List and explore three (3) or more data analysis techniques that can be applied to the datasets to produce valuable insights.

Step 7: Critically evaluate the data and type of data collection techniques required to address the business problem and provide solutions for achieving the business goals. Suggest if there are any additional data collection requirements or data sampling needs to solve the identified business problem.

Step 8: Summarise your findings and list their limitations.

Step 9: Provide recommendations for further analysis if required.

Business Report Format

The Business Report should have the following structure:

Title page - Include the subject code and subject name, your name, student ID and email address, the name of your Learning Facilitator and the submission date.
Table of contents
Introduction
Business Problems/Goals - Describe a business problem and the corresponding goals that your Business Report is trying to provide solutions for.
Data - In this section, include information that addresses the following points:

Identify a data set and source for your Business Report.
Provide a link to the dataset.
Describe the data and its context.
List available data types and key attributes.
Validate alignment between the business problem/goals and the dataset (e.g., identified in Step 1 and Step 2 of the instructions section above).
Identify headings in the dataset that may be of relevance for the strategic business goals or business problems.
List any data quality issues that you see in the dataset.

Data Analytics - List the data analysis techniques that can be applied to the selected dataset.
Recommendation - Recommend additional data requirements and the data collection/data sampling methods that can be used.
Conclusion - Provide a summary of the key business questions and recommendations on how the company can effectively use data to solve the business problems or meet the business goals that you identified.
References - Refer to the Referencing section on page 5 of this assessment brief for more details.