Deliverable 6 – data grain

Competency

Support proper formulation of decision-making criteria using Business Intelligence assets.

Instructions

You work for a tourism board at a top destination within the United States that among other tasks, acts as a third-party reseller of attraction tickets in one of the world’s top vacation destinations. The organization has an e-commerce presence where tickets are sold online, as well as a physical store location where people can go to purchase physical tickets in person. In all instances, the ticket purchases are recorded and referenced back to various marketing databases that allow the organization to see how well different promotional campaigns have done, which products sell better than others, and what time of year the sales are highest and lowest, to name but a few.

Jeff, a junior financial analyst, conducts reviews of the ticket sales data with painstaking detail, often producing reports that show detail lines for each individual sale from the online web storefront and the physical store. Strategic decisions regarding sales are often made based on a few small examples of individual rows from the report and often do not always reflect the sales trends accurately.

The board director does not see any issue with the reports that Jeff presents, in fact hailing his work as the best analysis he’s ever seen. You have been asked to discuss the current reporting practice with the board, including Jeff, in hopes you can offer some suggestions on how the data can be better presented, as well as explain why there is too much detail in the reports to support effective decision making.

The questions they are presenting you with include:

• What is the major issue with how Jeff is using the data?
• Why is too much data grain not necessarily a benefit to the decision-making process?
• What might be a better measure of the success of ticket sales than line by line review of every ticket sold?

The task:

Record a presentation using the screen sharing Webware/software of your choice (an Internet search will reveal many free options). Your presentation can be recorded with your own voiceover and visuals, just as you would if you were giving the presentation live.

Your presentation should explain the concepts contained within the DIKW Triangle. Explain how it applies in the decision-making process for ticket sales, as well as making suggestions on different report granularity, and how ticket sales data may be better presented through aggregation over months, quarters, and years.

Create a summary report to accompany your presentation as a takeaway for your executive management team.