Assignment
Choose a company apart from Amazon whose business is somewhat familiar to you. It can be a company that you have worked for, have dealt with, or are just interested in. Identify a business process in this company that can benefit from innovative use of data analytics. Your responsibility is to propose a creative, practical, and useful analytical enhancement to the business process to improve its performance. Answer the questions A-I.
A. Provide a brief background of the company in order to build the context.
B. Describe the business process that you selected. What is its main purpose/intended outcome? How does it fit in the company's overall business?
C. What change are you proposing to the business process? Compare and contrast the "before" and "after" process, preferably with the help of a diagram. Explain where the new analytical enhancement is embedded in the process. Use a simple process flowcharting technique such as the one described here to depict the proposed change.
D. How will the analytical enhancement provide the solution needed for your new process? Describe the modeling technique that you will use (e.g., classification, clustering) and why. Describe the output of the model, and how the output will be used within the new business process. (E.g., discuss what is being predicted, what part of the decision process will be affected, and how? Is there a major transformational opportunity such as using real-time analytics, unstructured data, etc.?)
E. What data will be needed to perform the above analytics? Identify the sources of data with a short description of data from each source, the essential data items, the amount of data (number of records), etc. What does each record represent? State the essential attributes (e.g., for supervised learning, mention the target variable and the feature vector; for unsupervised learning, mention the feature vector; for real-time analytics, mention the real-time data with its basic elements, and historical data, etc.).
F. What metrics should be used to measure the performance of the business process? List a diverse set of performance metrics with an emphasis on the critical ones. Clearly identify those metrics that you expect to improve specifically due to the analytical enhancement you propose in your innovation.
G. Who are the participants in the business process? How will their workflow be affected? Identify the persons/groups that are participating in the regular execution of the business process (not the modelers/technologists who implement the enhancement). Whose workflow will be affected because of the innovation you propose? What part of their workflow will be affected and how?
H. How will you test the improvement in the performance of the business process specifically due to the use of analytics? Describe the design of an experiment that you will conduct. State the hypothesis(es), the control and the treatment groups, the treatment (analytical enhancement) for the treatment group(s), and the outcome(s) that you will measure.
I. Optionally, describe any other relevant aspect of the project that has a bearing on its success.