Business intelligent 2012

1. (a) Briefly describe the role of Business Intelligence (BI) in modern organization.
(b) Discuss organisational decision making process and identify how several Business Intelligence tools and solutions might support specific activities.

2. (a) Define the concept of strategic performance management.

(b) describe how Balanced Score Card (BSC) is used to connect strategic planning to performance measurement in the organization. Pay special attention to the time aspects of BSC perspectives.

3. Describe the process need to create an interactive ‘Dashboard of Information’  application in an organization.  At each main step discuss the issues to be resolved and criteria to be used to arrive at the right solutions.

4. Compare and contrast the use of an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) and an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) system in an enterprise. Give exs to show the differences.

5. (a) Define concept and aim of the Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) functionality in relation to the Data Warehouse (DW) solution.  As part of the answer, briefly describe what problems ETL must address and resolve.

(b) Using a labelled diagram, show the steps of the ETL operation as implemented in a typical DW. Pay special attention to double flow of data and Meta-data.

6. (a) Define each of the following four concepts.

i) Master Data Management

ii) Data Quality

iii) Data Governance

iv) Cloud Computing

Describe how they relate to the several Business Intelligence (BI) technologies (i.e. typical BI related Information Systems solutions) available to the modern enterprise. And also show how they relate to the data flows of the Data Warehouse.

(b) Discuss what data governance and data quality issues might arise, in your opinion, from the implementation of an outsourced cloud computing solution.

Business intelligent 2011.

1. A) The future usefulness of any Performance Management initiative in an organization is underpinned by the determination of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Give a brief outline of the key issues which must be taken into consideration when choosing and defining KPIs.

B) Give an outline of the Balanced Scorecard (BCS) method. Briefly describe how KPIs (as above) relate to the BCS approach.

2. A) describe the typical development pitfalls related to the development of a data warehouse.

B) Outline, using a labelled diagram, the basic architecture of a data warehouse and describe the role meta data plays in this structure.

3. Compare and contrast the aim , role, and operation of Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools in the context of Business Intelligence initiatives.

4. (a) Based on the concept of ‘procedural rationality’ discuss how several types of Business Intelligence techniques might improve specific aspects of the organisational decision making process.

(b) Define a categorisation of organisational decision making problems using dimensions of ‘ownership’ and ‘strategic nature’.

5. Using a labelled diagram describe the operation of the Data Warehouse, define the basic architectural components and outline the major functionalities. Briefly describe the role an operational data store (ODS) could play in this structure.

6. describe the various types of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools and briefly discuss how the support common analytical operations.

7. Business Intelligence (BI) is aimed at supporting organisational decision makers who are often said to be operating under the assumptions of ‘Procedural rationality’. Describe what procedural rationality means in an organisational context and outline how different BI tools might support various aspects of this approach

Here are some webs which can be helpful:

A) "Vendors causing confusion on business intelligence
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/09/bi_ws_wk2/)

B) "Resurrecting old jargon - BI versus decision support?"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/bi_decisions/

C) "Transforming data into valuable business assets" – main page of a BI Firm’s site
http://www.imgroup.com/expertise/bi/Pages/default.aspx