Online Business Intelligence Fall 2023

  I found the lectures and readings on networks and network visualizations interesting. I especially liked in lecture 11 how Professor Ram described the world as a complex system full of networks. I also enjoyed what Albert Laszlo Barabasi had to say about networks in relation to the human body and how if we understand not only all of the parts of the human body or human genome, but also understand where everything goes (by mapping everything out via network science), then we can repair persons with ailing diseases etc. because we will know know both what part is needed and where it goes. We can diagnose and fix the problem just as a mechanic does. In lecture 11, I liked learning about nodes, edges, directed and undirected relationships, single mode, and two mode networks. It was helpful seeing everyday things like a person’s relationship with another person or a city’s relation to another city to really cement the idea that you really can map out all sorts of things as a network....

 Hello and thank you in advance for reading my blog post on Module 2. In Module 2, we covered web analytics and Google Analytics. I found these topics to be fascinating and benefitted from the Sun Microsystems reading on web metrics, the web analytics definitions reading, the Google Analytics tutorial reading, and the 19 differences reading. It was really interesting to start with the Sun Microsystems reading on web metrics showing all the different ways to configure your analytics tracking and then I capped the week off with completing Assignment III using Google Analytics where there are many default metrics already in place for off the shelf capabilities. In the Sun Microsystems reading, the author/presenter, Paul Strupp Ph.D, breaks down the different cost structures for monitoring web metrics at the time. I'm not positive of the date of the presentation but I'm assuming it's pre-Google Analytics. I wonder what the true cost of using Google Analytics truly is. I underst...

  I found the lecture and readings on dashboards to be fascinating. From the lecture, I understand that dashboards are a visual display of the most critical information presented in such a way that the viewer of the dashboard can absorb the important data elements from looking at the single page. I understand that dashboards were also defined by Peter McFadden as “an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical representation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators” so that the viewer can make a “informed decision” just by looking quickly at the dashboard (Ram Lecture 8).  Elsewhere in the lecture, I understood that dashboards should not be cluttered with superfluous information. Stick to the data points that provide the KPI’s. This could for example be related to an organization’s balanced scorecard as we learned about in a prior week’s lecture and readings.  Make sure you ha...

  Greetings MIS 587,   My name is Josh and I have lived and worked in Tucson for the last 5 years. I’m married to a wonderful spouse and have an old rescue dog named Remy. When I’m not working on homework or my day job, I enjoy working out, trying to keep my outdoor plants alive in the Tucson sun, smoking cigars, and going to the movies. I most look forward to learning about optimizing websites for increased web traffic using google analytics. I am looking forward to the course and learning more! What I gathered from the lecture is that big data refers to the enormous volume, variety, and velocity of data. Multiple zettabytes of data is quite a bit of data. The slide on megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes to petabytes to exabytes to zettabytes helped me to understand the volume of data that we are talking about when we discuss zettabytes. I also gathered that we no longer are limited to surveys of select groups to gather data. Instead, we can gather data from everyone as...