Posted: May 7th, 2020
Discussion Board Replies
Discussion Board Replies
Each reply must be at least 250 words. These include one in-text citation, and one biblical integration citation. All posts must strictly comply with APA style standards. All sources used except the textbook required sources must be published within the past five years.
Reply to Torrence
A lot is going on inside the corporation as the corporation consists of shareholders, leaders, employees, and all other members of the society who will be affected directly with the operations of the corporation. The successful use of business analytics is an important element of a company’s success (Liu, Han, & DeBello, 2018). Implementing a business analytics infrastructure can be helpful when it comes to keeping everything going smoothly. We will never fully leverage business analytics without changing the corporate infrastructure—culture, leadership, organization, and planning (Bartlett, 2013). When implementing a business analytics infrastructure, these four areas align with the following components: Benefits of Business Analytics, Build Business Analytics Team, Identify Talent, and Create Business Analytics Culture.
Benefits of Business Analytics (Leadership)
A business analytics program is essential to the health of a competitive organization. By analyzing key business metrics, the leadership team of the business can make smarter decisions that drive greater value for the business overall. Business analytics can also provide insight to what strategies are working and where to invest in growth. An overview will be provided to describe the specific transactional, informational, and strategic benefits offered by a
business analytics program.
Build Business Analytics Team (Planning)
The right business analytics team can turn massive amounts of data into insightful business knowledge that can be used to make timely business decisions. A strong business analytics team requires a unique set of skills and qualifications and piecing together these individuals can be difficult. The number one quality that most experts look for when building the team is intellectual curiosity. This quality is difficult to find because it cannot be taught or bought but is highly desirable because technical skills alone are not enough. Organizations should seek candidates that demonstrate an involvement in a wide variety of projects and are constantly seeking to gain new knowledge. Analysts with these traits are more likely to dig deep into the data and are more effective at asking questions when.
performing their analysis.
Identify Talent (Organization)
When selecting among candidates, the organization should select candidates that have strong programming skills because the best data scientists must be able to manipulate the data in addition to just viewing and analyzing it. There is a big difference between a statistician that reviews and interprets the data set and the data scientist that can change the code that collects the data. Organizations should also look for candidates that have excellent communication skills. As mentioned before, these analysts need to tell the story of the data and provide visual representations whenever possible. These candidates should be able to provide real-world examples of how they were able to use their work to improve a business process.
Create Business Analytics Culture (Culture)
To truly succeed in implementation, business analytics must become an accepted component of the organization’s culture (Rathore, S., Panwar, A., & Soral, P. (2014). Many studies on business analytics programs have found that companies who fail to integrate analytics into the organizational culture ultimately fail to deliver on program expectations. To ensure that the stakeholders of the organization are involved, it is important that a strong analytics-driven culture is developed. Organizations that adopt an analytics culture can create economic advantages over competitors by quickly gaining insight from data and translating it into impactful business decisions. Companies across all industries are aggressively entering into analytics by making large investments in new technologies. Leaders of these corporations must be sure to create a business analytics driven culture because large investments in technology are not enough to be successful on their own, it is the people in the organization that shape the culture. The Holy Bible offers scripture in the New Testament that is applicable to leaders who create a business analytics culture. The scripture is “He is the great shepherd and leader of the flock of God (Hebrews 13:20).”
References
Bartlett, R. (2013). A Practitioners Guide to Business Analytics: Using Data Analysis Tools to
Improve Your Organization’s Decision Making and Strategy (1st ed). New York, McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 9780071807593.
Liu, Y., Han, H., & DeBello, J. (2018). The Challenges of Business Analytics: Successes and
Failures. HICSS.
New International Version (2011). New International Version Online www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/#booklist
Rathore, S., Panwar, A., & Soral, P. (2014). Critical factors for successful implementation of
business analytics: Exploratory findings from select cases. International Journal of
Business Analytics and Intelligence, 2(2), 12-22.
Reply to Katherine
Analytics are critical to the success of an organization and its leaders and requires the participation and cooperation of both. Business analytics cannot be utilized to their full extent without leadership, organization, and planning which are reinforced by corporate culture and leadership (Bartlett, 2013). The corporate culture creates the ability to support or hinder data analytics. Organizations without an organizational culture conductive to change or innovation will receive the analytics, suggestions, and ideas but will not be able to implement due to cultural barriers (Upadhyay & Kumar, 2020). Contrary to poor corporate culture, a strong corporate culture will allow a company to understand, leverage, and utilize the analytics to develop new initiatives, goals, and strategies that will increase the success of the organization (Bartlett, 2013).
The corporate culture is shaped by the values and mission making it critical that these allow for the attainment of knowledge and skills allowing the organization and its people to achieve greater aspirations (Greer & Shuck, 2020). Data analytics requires participation from each person within the organization from the leaders to the newest staff members. Every person must be dedicated to not only gaining insight into the analytics but also taking action to implement any changes required based upon the results (Upadhyay & Kumar, 2020). In order to fully understand the complexities and impact analytics have on a corporation, leaders must ensure they have the right people and delegate to those who understand the nuances of these analytics to make decisions and increase engagement (Bartlett, 2013). Understanding the collected analytics can be cumbersome and tedious but the collection and analysis of big data can help corporations understand their customers, improve business practices, research trends, optimize performance, and improve financial operations (Ahmed & Pathan, 2019).
Understanding analytics is only useful if those who understand are founded in integrity and Christian principles. “The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them” (Proverbs 11:3, ESV). There are many examples, historically and today, of companies who utilized analytics to understand their client but later became greedy and misused the information or falsified realities to make certain aspects of business look better. In the early 2000’s, it was revealed that leaders at Enron and WorldCom falsely reported their financials for years and hid the truth from colleagues, investors, and the world to make themselves look better. This led to the further development of fraud analysis to help detect key patterns to help monitor and minimize suspicious behavior (Bartlett, 2013).
God requires His people to do what is right, regardless of the cost. Some leaders and corporations lose sight of these principles and focus on money and other worldly things which does not end prosperously. “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Timothy 6:9, ESV). This was apparent with the Enron and WorldCom scandal in the early 2000’s. This scandal reinforces the importance of having ethically sound leaders who focused on the needs of others instead of their own greed. Their greed and corruption were discovered and ultimately led to the downfall of their organizations and their own ruin. Analysis is useful in increasing productivity, creativity, and innovation but if the leaders and the culture are not aligned, the results will not be as impactful or positive.
References:
Ahmed, M., & Pathan, A. K. (2019). Data analytics. Concepts, Techniques, and Applications. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Bartlett, R. (2013). A practitioner’s guide to business analytics. McGraw-Hill Education.
Greer, T. W., & Shuck, B. (2020). Mounting the new guard: The golden rule as a basis for organizational culture change in response to challenges in academia. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 22(1), 102-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422319886298
Upadhyay, P., & Kumar, A. (2020). The intermediating role of organizational culture and internal analytical knowledge between the capability of big data analytics and a firm’s performance. International Journal of Information Get research paper samples and course-specific study resources under homework for you course hero writing service – Manage ment, 52, 102100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102100
