Business Purpose Analysis

Wells (2008) stresses three criteria that allow business analytics to be effective in an organization: a) Purposeful, b) Insightful, and c) Actionable. While you will be considering all these criteria throughout the course, this learning activity focuses on the criteria “Purposeful.” To provide information that helps businesses create an action, the first step is to define the Purpose of the analysis. The Purpose could be predictive—to predict what may happen in the future—or it could be to examine existing identified problems about which the business wants to gain additional insight.

• Read Business analytics – Getting the point.
• This activity builds on the analysis your team started in Week 1 with your selected publicly traded company.
  • Review the business goals identified and the KPIs created in Week 1. From that information, and information found on the company’s website, your team should identify a problem or scenario that the company could develop an analytical approach to evaluating.
    • Consider Wells’ definition of “Purposeful” and his examples.
    • Other examples might be a company’s objective of sustainability, green initiatives, or global expansion. This Purpose may result in the restating of one or more KPI (depending on the Purpose).
  • In a 1-2 page paper:
    • Clearly define the Purpose of your selected publicly traded business for which the team intends to develop an analytical review.
    • Correlate this Purpose to the KPIs initially developed, or add an additional KPI that relates to this project.
• Have one member of your team submit your paper to your professor by the end of the week.