Using Information Technology

Decisions made at the operational level involve long-term strategy and are undertaken by the leaders of the organization.

At the operational level, decision makers need more aggregated information, sorted and tallied in different ways, to monitor success and plan next steps compared to those at the strategic level.

Mid-level decisions undertaken by managers by drawing upon business intelligence to implement marketing plans and product development are made at the tactical level.

Strategic-level decisions involve direct interactions with customers and have predetermined policies and procedures that spell out how to handle different situations.

Building data warehouses often slows down operational systems.

Data warehouses offer an opportunity to combine the data housed in separate systems into one and then load it to a database optimized for complex queries.

External databases that are either purchased or publicly accessible are not considered reliable sources of business intelligence.

Companies use intelligent agents to extract useful business intelligence from private, inaccessible websites.

The online analytical processing system allows users to slice and dice massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends.

OLAP systems achieve their speed and their slice-and-dice capabilities by building multidimensional data cubes.

The market basket analysis examines relationships to reveal customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items.

Text mining is a discovery process in which unstructured text information is the source of business intelligence.

Text mining, which monitors web chatter, helps in managing customer relationships and spotting crises early.

What-if analysis allows a user to set a target value for a particular metric and tells the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal.

What-if analysis is also known as goal seeking because of the similarities between these two tools.

Optimization is an extension of goal seeking in which a user can change many variables to reach some maximum or minimum target, as long as the changes stay within the constraints the user identifies.

Clickstream data refers to every single click by every visitor on a website, along with associated data revealing customer behavior patterns.

Stickiness refers to how frequently users move from one related site to another.

A dashboard is a gateway that provides access to a variety of relevant information from many different sources on one screen.

Mashup is an approach to aggregating content from multiple internal and external sources on customizable web pages.