Business Analytics and Data-Driven Decision Making

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Overview

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Business analytics, business intelligence, and data-driven decision-making are essential skills for today's professionals. In this course, you'll learn how organizations use data to solve business problems, improve performance, and make informed decisions. Explore the business analytics process, from defining business challenges and managing data to generating insights through descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. You'll also examine how organizations use data visualization and presentation tools to communicate findings and drive action. Through real-world examples, you'll discover how analytics helps organizations identify trends, forecast outcomes, and support decisions. You'll explore decision-support frameworks, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to transform data into business insights. By the end of the course, you'll understand how organizations use analytics to evaluate opportunities and make decisions across marketing, operations, finance, and technology. You'll also gain familiarity with Microsoft Excel, OLAP, dashboards, and data mining methods used for data-informed decision-making.

Syllabus

Analytics Foundations and Decision-Making
- Effective business decisions require more than intuition. Organizations increasingly rely on business analytics to evaluate options, solve problems, and improve outcomes. In this module, you'll explore how technology supports managerial decision-making and the frameworks organizations use to analyze challenges. You'll learn how managers make decisions in structured, semi-structured, and unstructured environments and apply Herbert Simon's decision-making model and the Gorry and Scott Morton decision framework to real-world scenarios. You'll also examine the business analytics process, including how organizations define problems, manage data, and transform information into actionable recommendations. Through examples, you'll see how analytics helps organizations improve decision quality and reduce uncertainty. By the end of this module, you'll be able to explain the key steps organizations use to transform data into actionable insights and evaluate how technology supports decision-making at multiple organizational levels. 💡 Tip for Success: Every workplace involves decisions. As you move through this module, identify decisions you make regularly and consider whether data or analytics could help you make them more effectively.
Descriptive and Predictive Analytics
- Organizations collect vast amounts of data, but data alone does not create value. Business success depends on the ability to analyze information, identify patterns, and anticipate future outcomes. In this module, you'll explore two foundational forms of business analytics: descriptive and predictive analytics. You'll begin with descriptive analytics, examining how organizations understand historical performance using tools such as online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, and decision-support systems. You'll then explore predictive analytics, which helps organizations forecast customer behavior, demand patterns, and future outcomes using regression analysis and forecasting models, applied across industries including retail, healthcare, and finance. By the end of this module, you'll be able to distinguish between descriptive and predictive analytics, identify appropriate use cases for each, and explain how organizations move from understanding the past to preparing for the future.💡 Tip for Success: Pay attention to the data your organization already collects. Insights often come not from gathering more data, but from asking better questions about the information you already have.
Prescriptive Analytics and Data Visualization
- The true value of analytics comes from turning insights into action. In this module, you'll explore how organizations use prescriptive analytics and data visualization tools to make informed decisions, communicate recommendations, and drive business results. You'll learn how prescriptive analytics builds on predictive analytics by recommending actions and evaluating potential outcomes before decisions are made. You'll also examine how organizations use dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), geographic information systems (GIS), and other visualization tools to communicate complex information clearly. Through real-world examples, you'll see how businesses use these tools to optimize operations, monitor performance, and support strategic decision-making. By the end of this module, you'll be able to explain how prescriptive analytics supports decision-making and evaluate presentation tools used to communicate data-driven insights to stakeholders.💡 Tip for Success: Strong analysts do more than find insights. They communicate them effectively. When reviewing reports or dashboards at work, focus on how the information is presented and whether it clearly supports a decision.
Course Graded Assignment
- Summative Assessment for the course