Business Miscellaneous
by JustEtc Publications Ltd
Distributed by justEtc |
Some Areas of Study in Business
- Administrative Support
- Business Analysis
- Business Law
- Communication
- Consulting Skills
- Customer Service
- e-Learning
- Finance and Accounting
- Foundation Skills
- Human Resources
- Industry Foundations
- Knowledge Management
- Leadership
- Management
- Marketing
- Operations
- Personal Development
- Program/Portfolio Management
- Project Management
- Sales
- Strategic Planning
- Team Building
- Logistics
- Supply Chain Management
Business Analysis: An Overview
- Before 19th century no one systematically studied the effectiveness of the different approaches of management
- Business Analysis - is a very recent profession. Due to the radical change in information management and communication businesses needed a new way of analysis - hence, the profession came into play
- The profession came into existence during the information technology boom in 1980 - 1990
- When businesses created a new profession to serve the purpose that a System Analyst does in IT - the profession became the business analyst
- Though, nothing can guarantee success, understanding the core concepts of the Business Analysis area will help you to work more effectively as a business analyst
- Six knowledge areas of Business Analysis:
- Enterprise Analysis
- Requirements Planning and Management
- Requirements Elicitation
- Requirements Analysis and Documentation
- Requirements Communication
- Solution Assessment and Validation
- Responsibilities of a Business Analyst
- Identify Business Problems and Opportunities
- Eliciting, Analyzing, Communicating, and validating requirements for changes to business processes
- Recommending solutions to help businesses achieve their goals
- The role of the project managers and business analysts may seem similar. Really, there are some overlapping areas such as, identifying goals and requirements, risk analysis, and finding strategies for project success. However, the project manager is responsible for the timely completion of the project within the budget. The business analyst ensures that the project is completed correctly with the defined requirements.
Core Skills in Business Analysis
SKILLS IN BUSINESS ANALYSIS
- Knowledge Skills: Analysis knowledge skill set, Business knowledge skill set, IT knowledge skill set
- Collaboration Skills: Interpersonal skills collaboration skill set, Diplomacy collaboration skill set, Organizational development collaboration skill set
- Leadership Skills: Mentoring leadership skill set, Forward-thinking leadership skill set, Elicitation and analysis leadership skill set, Designation leadership skill set
- Core Skills in Business Analysis
The Areas of Business Analysis Knowledge
Six Areas
- enterprise analysis: the environment of the organization at large
- requirements planning and management:
- requirements gathering areas : requirements elicitation, requirements analysis and documentation, and solution assessment and validation.
- requirements communication
Enterprise Analysis and Making a Business Case
- A Complete Guide to Business Analysis
- The Zachman framework: A formal, highly structured way to define intricate systems. Allows the business analyst to organize collected data and analyze it effectively
- The Zachman framework: A six by five matrix. rows: the different perspectives of the enterprise, columns: questions to be asked to design a business entity
- Example:
The Zachman framework
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...
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What
(Data)
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How
(Function)
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Where
(Network)
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Who
(People)
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When
(Time)
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Why
(Motivation)
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Scope
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Business Model
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System Model
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Technology Model
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Component Configuration
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- The POLDAT framework: A model that looks like a hexagon , having six different areas with tables, graphs, and other documentation. Each section depicts an area of change. If one section is changed, change must also take place in the other five areas
- Related Skills/Activities
- Enterprise Analysis
- Creating the Business Architecture
- Feasibility Study Techniques
- Defining Project Scope
- Developing a Business Case
- The Risk Assessment
- Project Decision Making
- Supporting the Project
Team: Team Conflict: Team Advantages: Random Thoughts
Reference: Internet
- After the world war II, Industries are more sold on
team work than independent work. Note: Personally, I am confidant in both team and independent work.
- Studies show that, when a company applies team based development effectively (most important), profits improve dramatically.
- When you are working alone, you are working on your
own beliefs, but in a team, your beliefs and values
are open to be challenged, it may sound stressful to
some extent
- These challenges really bring power to the team. These
challenges will also create conflicts among the team
members
- Benefits of conflict: Opportunity to learn, nurtures
creativity and innovation, allows personal growth
- Team: A group of small number of people with synergistic skills working toward a common goal
- Team benefits: Facilitates multi-functional tasks, improves productivity and processes, solve problems resourcefully
- Teams bring diversity of skills, create better procedures, improve relationships
- Teams with people from across the organization can define and solve issues better than the senior management
- Studies show performance improvements happen 40 percent faster in team-based companies
- Building effective teams is not always easy. Many times ego, desire to stand out, power, incompetence of the team members, insincerety, dishonesty - may be on the way of success. True that many teams just don't work
- Factors that damage team effectiveness:
- Little or no leadership
- No organizational Vision
- Bad policies or procedures
- Unclear team roles
- Lack of trust
- DARE: To reduce the number of problems in teams
- D of DARE: Discover: is there anything/anyone to help the team? do the team members have time for the team?
- A of DARE: Arrange: Arrange a process to identify the issues, communicate team vision, assign roles and responsibilities, provide resources, train people
- R of DARE: Roll Out: Provide additional training, develop team guidelines, establish incentives and feedback management
- E of DARE: Evolve : Continuously look ways to improve systems, revise plans, and assess team progress. Address changing needs
- Developing strong relationships among team members is also crucial
What is Data Warehousing?
Data Warehouse is a storage of an organization's historical data. Usually, data warehouse is built to provide a decision support system to the management. Data warehouse can be mined (using data mining) and queried to collect overall and summarized business information that significantly helps in decision making. It can provide trends over many years.
Operational databases are optimized for day to day operation access. Here, the relationships are normalized and further divided into more relations/tables to make accessing faster that also reduces data traffic among the systems. But data warehouse does the reverse, where relationships/tables are de-normalized as much as possible to provide the required information to the management. As datawarehouse provides summarized information de-normalization helps, otherwise the data would be required to collect from many tables and the queries may be running over data for 10 years (millions/billions of records). Usually, data warehouse is created separately from the operational databases.
Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle both have supports and tools to create Data warehouse Systems. There are also free tools for the purpose.
Random Information on BI
- Real internet money/business lies in B2B not in
B2C.
- Decision Support System (DSS): Full spectrum of
systems that allow/help management to take
decisions, such as, reporting, OLAP, data mining.
- Java provides support for web enabled DSS
- JDM is Java's Data mining/BI API.
- BI Applications: Balanced Score-card, Activity Based
Costing.
- Data warehouse elements
- Operational Environment: Maintains day to day
activities. Raw Data
- Independent data mart: A small data ware house
specific to one topic/area/subject
- Extraction: Extraction of data from operational
systems
- Extraction Store: Data storage after extraction
- Transformation and cleansing: Before putting
data into the central/main warehouse data needs
to be cleaned up
- Extraction log: Create a log in the
transformation and cleansing process
- External source: Data originated outside the
organization is also incorporated into the data
warehouse.
- Data administrator: The person who ensures the
quality of data
- Central Repository: Stores all data and meta
data
- Meta data: Data about data. Example: the
extraction log.
- Dependent Data Mart: Relies on the data
warehouse for the sources of its data
- Distributed Data Warehouse: Warehouse data is
physically distributed across a company's
information infrastructure.
- Data mining types: classification, and estimation.
- Classification: categorize customers, Estimation: predict or estimate some numerical value
- Decision trees: modeling technique helps in
deciding. Different alternatives are drawn as paths
where nodes represent the selected alternative.
edges/paths may carry some probability values as
selection/influencing criteria.
- Neural networks: Try to mimic the work nature of
human brain to take a decision.
- General modeling: Well-suited for categorizing.
- Balanced Scorecard application: views the health and
well-being of the organization by more than its
financial data. We need to define: Vision, Strategy,
Strategic themes, Strategic Objectives, Key
performance indicators.
- Activity based costing application:
- Three types of organizations: Engineer driven: They know how to make a product. Than sales it through sales force. Sales Driven: They know how to sale a particular product, then make the product and sell it. Customer driven: They Know what customers want, then make the products and sale them. Customer driven organizations are the most successful.
How to implement BI/Warehouse
Steps in Data Warehouse Design and Implementation
- Most BI projects usually fail. It is not due to the errors in construction steps but due to the inappropriate design steps and methodologies.
- Waterfall method is not appropriate for BI. A method like developmental spiral may be more appropriate. Ref: [W. A. Giovinazzo ]
- Steps in developmental spiral: Definition, Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation/Deployment, Maintenance, Evaluation
- Developmental spiral method is effective for BI only when object oriented approach is taken
- In developmental spiral, object modeling is used to represent objects in the related business areas. In object modeling, objects are represented as rectangles, the rectangles can be treated as classes. Classes/objects can have sub-classes/sub-objects. Objects have attributes. Objects also have some special properties like: accelerators, stops.
- Definition - first step of developmental spiral: Define a short description what you want to build - like the problem statement in a research proposal. Example:
I want to build a data mart that will provide data to support the analysis of customer demographics such as age, gender, and income for all product lines
- Analysis Phase: In this step, analyze the requirements of the BI system, the nature of the BI system, the expectations from the BI system. Interviewing different parties will help a lot:
- Interview the sponsor to get a detail understanding of the mission. The questions will include: Data-related(which objects are related to the business needs?), user-related: who are the users, system evaluation: what parameters will make the project a success?
- Interviewing management: To understand management's expectation of the data warehouse. Questions may include: User profile related (what types of systems you use/will use to access BI?), System vision: what do you see as the objective of the data ware house, System Evaluation: what parameters will make the project a success?
- Interviewing Users : Interviewing users who will use the system
- Interviewing information technology staffs: To know the current state of the organization's information systems
- Design phase: output - object model, implementation model
- Start with the analysis phase information. The design phase is complete when all the objects related to the mission are well defined. An object diagram needs to be drawn showing all objects, relationships, attributes.
- Another chart listing all the attributes and their data types will be useful. Objects will have relations like super classes or sub-classes.
- Cardinality relationships: exactly one, one to many, zero or one, zero to many
- aggregation may be required in some cases. Aggregation: an object is composed of other objects.
- Implementation Model: Data warehouse databases are multi dimensional databases. Objects are represented in more than two dimensions. Common practice is: three dimensional databases. Such as an object/table represented with three dimensions (called cube) like: product, dealer, and time. RDBMS's are two dimensional.
- Data cubes: have six possible different views [permutation of three dimensions].
- Why not always multidimensional databases: because of space requirements.
- Star schema: Provides a multidimensional flavor in two dimensional relational databases.
- Star schema uses a concept called fact tables to bind dimensions to create a multidimensional space.
- Denormalization of the tables are utilized in star schema to create multi dimension.
- Dimension table: Think about a three dimensional cube. Each wall represents a dimension table. Or think it as a mathematical combination of the dimensions.
- All objects represented in the dimensions can slowly change over time - slowly changing dimensions. There are many approaches to address this issue.
- Snowflakes: normalizing dimensions - not always a great thing
- Implementation considerations: Parallel processing, Bitmapped Indexing, Star Query Optimization, Summation Tables
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Required Components for Internet Income
Do you want to earn through your website? Well you want to start your own home business. In this category, we will provide you detailed information to meet your needs. We will provide information how you can earn through your website. We will also explore the opportunities for online based home business and online business.
First you need to know what are the options that can make you money through your websites. If you search the Internet you will find thousands of options and opportunities. I personally believe all of them are not useful. Some of them are just scam. We will try to identify some good options.
Here we will discuss our opinions in several steps: Steps:
- Types of programs that will pay you
- Requirements and tools needed for such programs
Types of Programs. For details click on HOME Button.
- Pay Per Click
- Pay Per Surf
- Pay Per Sale
- Pay Per Lead
- Pay Per Email Read
- Pay Per Pop Up show
- Pay for Blind Clicks
- Earn by Joining Reseller Programs
- Being a Seller in a Program
Well, these are some basic categories. We will add when we are familiar with new options. You can join and test one program alone. Even, you can try multiple programs simultaneously. Please, check the policies for corresponding programs whether they comply together.
Tools and Requirements needed for online earning:
- A Well Designed Website
- Website Hosted with User Friendly URL
- Merchant Tools
- Marketting
A Well Designed Website
You yourself can build your website or take help of an expert to build your website. You can learn HTML, FrontPage, DreamWeaver, JavaScript, Phtoshop, Flash, PHP, MySQL to build a good website. In future links to several free tools to build website will be provided.
Website Hosted with User Friendly URL
You need a hosting space for your website. There are plenty of free webhosting services in the Internet. The good talk about them are they are free. However, they are not good for online business. Also they are not good for Pay Per Click programs as they might force you to keep their adds on your webpages. If you are interested with free webhosting please search google.com with the phrase "free webhosting" and try the links. You can also try the link http://www.free-webhosts.com/. If you want paid hosting service you can search google with the phrase "ranking web hosting". You can also try with similar phrases. You can also try www.TheHostingChart.com, www.top10webhosting.com, toptenreviews.com.
For online transactions you will need to setup merchant accounts with your hosting packages. You need secure SSL connection. If you work as a seller you will need to use shopping cart from your hosting/other companies. You can yourself program your shopping cart. Verisign is a company that will help you to preserve security in your online transactions.
When you join a program you will get payment from the company. The company will pay you in various ways. They might send you check. There are some convenient ways to accept money online from the owner of the programs. Such as:
- Paypal
- Egold
- StormPay
- IntGold
- EPassporte
Personally I am familir with paypal. I found it to be secure and trustable way of making online transactions. Other options are new to me. However, not all companies work paypal. Hence, in some cases you will not have any option to avoid the others. Read articles regarding the other options, consult with your friends and other webmasters to know about the services clearly.
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