Business Data Analysis: Techniques and Recommendations

You are a BI analyst working for an organisation. Your goal is to conduct a rigorous investigation on business data and business performance indicators for the organisation or some relevant companies.

Your task is to choose the appropriate technique/s taught in class to analyse the key data presented in the chosen dataset/s. You shall present your findings accompanied by recommendations to the company’s management team or relevant target audience. You should use all the skills and knowledge that you have learned in the module for the preparation of your report. Appropriate techniques in data analysis and visualisation should be critically evaluated and presented in your report. The stages of your analyses should encompass the following: (i) descriptive statistics analysis; (ii) inferential statistics analysis; (iii) advanced data analytics.  You should use python other relevant software to help you analyse the chosen dataset/s.

You should consider to address the following questions and summarise them in your literature, methodology, findings and discussion and recommendation.

1. Focus on a chosen organisation. Decide on the objectives of your data analyses which will be aligned to your organisation’s vision, mission or business models.

2. Use additional literature to support your choice of the business case.

3. Justify the chosen procedures and/or methods to analyse key data, and provide justification for your case.

4. Justify the chosen procedures and/or methods for visualisation (not more than three) and provide interpretation for your visual and empirical results.

5. Please follow the instructions from pages 2 onwards carefully. All of your key findings work should be written as a report.

Abstract - Provide a brief summary of the main contents, findings, conclusions and recommendations in the report. This enables the reader to quickly scan the report for relevance. It should include:

· a concise statement of the subject of your research

· discussion of what your research set out to do

· the research methods used

· the conclusions reached

Introduction - This should introduce the main part of the report. It lets the reader know what the report is about; it outlines the key issues and concerns. It should be fairly concise and should include:

· an explanation of what your research is about

· aims, objectives, research questions or hypotheses clearly defined and discussed briefly

· an outline of the contents of the report

· you may also want to briefly discuss why you became interested in the topic of your research

Literature Review

Literature Review – Conduct a critical literature survey on business models, processes, strategies, decision support and data  intelligence (e.g. business intelligence) that will be relevant to the target organisations (or sector) for your data analysis. Additionally, you can select and critically discuss books, articles, and other resources that relate directly to your chosen organisations in the datasets.

It is useful to keep reminding yourself of the aims, objectives, research questions, and etc… of the research and include literature that is specific to these. This section or chapter can be divided into sub-sections with appropriate sub-headings. You may find it helpful to relate these sub-headings to your research aims, questions, and etc….

Methodology – discussion of the appropriate approach/es and research methods that that you have employed to collect primary/secondary data for the purpose of this assignment.  You are also expected to include relevant phases of the data lifecycle. Additionally, this section (or chapter) ought to include a critical discussion of the data analysis techniques you have chosen. You are expected to provide embedded citations to support your discussion.

Findings and discussion – you are expected to show the analysis of your collected data, interpretation derived from your data analysis, use of appropriate methods to present your findings, and draw useful conclusions for the next section.

It should be about words for the methodology and findings sections.

Recommendations –You should provide your recommendation based on your analysis and interpretation of results.

Conclusion - This section should highlight the findings of the report. It should emphasise the themes raised in the introduction and summarise what has been established. To produce a good summary, make sure that you review the evidence and arguments contained in the main body of your report and map them directly to your research questions or hypotheses. Remember that the conclusions you reach will be based on the evidence you have considered – primary, and secondary sources. It is important to bear this in mind so that you do not make the mistake of drawing conclusions that cannot be justified from the evidence you have considered.

Write the conclusion of your report in a form that enables the reader to understand the major issues, points and findings of your research simply from reading this section alone.

Bibliography - All research reports require a bibliography that is composed of the references you have cited in the text of your report. The most favoured referencing style is the Harvard Referencing System because, unlike systems involving numbering, it is not affected by altering the text. Failure to cite and reference sources will result in plagiarism and could have a negative impact on your results due to poor research and scholarly practice.

If you require more word counts for your paper, you can use your Appendix and do not exceed more than 1,500 words for additional explanation. Append all the codes you have run for your data analysis in this section

The total number of words for your report will be 3000-3500 words.

You are expected to present your research work using PowerPoint slides or other presentation tools with audio. The duration of your presentation will be 10 minutes.