Business intelligence

1) The second assignment consists of two activities and relates to the organisation you have chosen for Assignment 1.World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
1) Practical activity (40% of mark): submission of a working dashboard. Create the design of a dashboard using one of the tools shown in the practicals (Microsoft PowerBI or Tableau). You should submit the dashboard by saving the dashboard as a file (*.pbix or *.twbx) and submit that file with your report (see below). Also include a screenshot in the report. Further you need to add a description of what it contains and how someone can interact with it. Make sure that you use at least one of the new types of visualisations (not just charts). Note that you should focus on externally available data and the data can be different to what you have mentioned in Assignment 1.
2) Written activity (50% of mark): explain the approach taken in deciding what to put into the dashboard to demonstrate your understanding of the business’s need and how often the data will need to be changed (there will always be more data available).
Outline the challenges in developing the dashboard. Provide advice on (a) how the organisation would benefit from more BIA and (b) specific recommendations on what the organisation could do to make implementation easier (eg: data quality, governance of classifications, etc) – refer to BIA lifecycle. For the written component, create a report in a similar format to the first assignment addressing the points above.

Assignments
Scope
You can choose to cover all areas of the organisation or focus on particular field of operation (eg: marketing, HR, manufacturing, environment sustainability, public reputation). If you are doing a degree in that area, you might find that useful.
For example: Apple Inc
One of Apple’s strengths is being able to manufacturing and deliver to millions of customers globally. A threat to that may be worker injury, equipment breaking down or unreliable distribution. Which groups/users in Apple would want data to deal with those issues – what data would they need? In what form?
A company that needs to do a better job of recruiting the right staff – the dashboard then would be for HR managers.

Marking criteria
The assignments will be marked on how well you cover each of the requirements mentioned above as well as the following points worth 10% of the mark:
• Referencing
o Correct referencing
o Referencing quality
o Reference recency
• Layout
• Academic/Business Language
• Grammar and Spelling

Aim of the assignments
Together the two assignments will give you practice at developing a real-world business proposal. As well as meeting academic requirements you could consider yourself as a consultant to that organisation – if your proposal is adopted they would be paying you to do the work. Assume that the reader knows little about BI.
However the assignments are not just a sales pitch – you have to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about, back up your arguments with evidence, communicate new concepts and demonstrate to the reader that you have understood their business requirements enough to recommend specific BI in the form of a dashboard.
Make use of the course material and especially the BI Lifecycle to develop the parts of the assignment – this is business problem-solving and understanding someone’s requirements – a skill you will use as a professional. Like all skills can take practice!
Presentation/structure
The structure should address the points listed in the assignment outline (at beginning of this guide). As a minimum include a title page and section headings. The title page is separate to the assignment cover page.
Sample templates for the two assignments are available on the course website. You don’t have to use these. You can also use some parts of these templates (eg: the sample templates include Table of Contents and Executive Summary, you can leave these out if you want).
Since this is proposal for a business audience, it should be presented in a professional format, however the effort should be on what the assignment.
Using bullet points are OK for some sections but you’ll need sentences for each point (ie. just a bullet point list with no explanation won’t work)

Assignment 2: 2000 words +/- 10%
One mark will be deducted if the assignment is too short or too long for each 10% too short or too long. Keeping to a word limit requires a focus on what the reader most needs to know.
These are included in the word count:
• The ‘body’ of the assignment:
• Headings
• Direct quotes
• Summary/Executive Summary (if you chose to include one)
• Diagram headings and captions
• Footnotes

These are excluded:
• Title page
• Table of contents
• References
• Referencing/Backing up your statements
• Referencing is important for both assignments to: (a) expand your knowledge of the assignment topic and (b) provide evidence to the claims you make and (c) demonstrate you know what you are talking about to make a convincing proposal.
• The general rule is if you are using information or data that is not of your own creation then you need to acknowledge it. Not only is this for academic integrity but to add weight to your recommendations – to show they are just not opinions.
• This includes the screenshots, data you use and points taken from the lectures.

How many references?
That depends on how many points you are making. Generally more is better because you have used more sources to understand the topic and reinforce your points.
A minimum of 3 references is required, not including the lecture material and where you source sample dashboard and data from. Just adding as many references as possible without using them in the assignment won’t earn maximum marks.
If you plagiarise (ie. copy from references and don’t include it in quotes or include a reference) you will be penalised – we have failed students for doing this!
We want your understanding on the topic, not copied words from experts – this only demonstrates that you can research well, not apply your learning.
Reference quality
The type (quality) of references makes a difference and this is considered in the marks as well. Feel free to use the readers and links from the lectures and Course Outline.
Avoid marketing/vendor sites and general websites – the quality is not assured, ie. anyone can get a website up regardless of their expertise and marketing material from software companies is usually biased. The exception would be news sites when you want to report an event.
Finding references by Googling them is a poor approach – try the library catalogue instead.

Reference recency
Since BI is a fast moving area use references from the last 5 years*. Consider if you were the CEO receiving the proposal – in a fast changing business environment would you trust a report that is using data from 6 years ago?
However in some cases – especially for data for Assignment 2 – you not be able to find recent data then explain that.
* eg: agile methodology, self serve BI, big data, spatial data, more user-friendly/accessible predictive analytics, BI being initiated and funded by business not IT and cloud infrastructure that are new to mainstream BI in the last 5 years. These are significantly changing the approach to making BI available

Referencing style
Please use the Harvard style of referencingin-text citations.
The references for data used can be included in the references section.
References must be in English.
References must be available when the assignment is being marked.
Sample data sources:
• Gartner’s analysis by industry (see Using Gartner Resources tip sheet)
• Australian Bureau of Statistics http://www.abs.gov.au
• SA Government http://data.sa.gov.au/
• Australian Government http://data.gov.au/
• AURIN portal https://portal.aurin.org.au/
• http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/03/27/publicly
• http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html
• http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/
• Tableau resources http://public.tableau.com/s/resources?qt=&qt-overview_resources=1#qt-overview_resources