Chapter 7: Decision Support and Business Intelligence

Question 1

What is business intelligence?

Answer 1

Business intelligence is the use of IS to gather and analyse data/information to make better decisions. It also refers to information gained from IS.

Question 2

What are the structured, unstructured and semi structured decisions?

Answer 2

• Structured decisions: Optimal solution reached in a routine series of steps
• Unstructured: No single procedure to attain optimal solution
• Semi-structured: Neither structured nor unstructured

Question 3

Outline the Decision-making process

Answer 3

1. Intelligence phase: collect facts, beliefs, and ideas
2. Design phase: design method for considering collected data
3. Choice phase: select choice from options
4. Implementation phase: operationalize the choice and monitor

Question 4

What are the 2 information types?

Answer 4

Transactional - Single business process

Analytical - Organisational information

Question 5

What is Transaction processing (TPS) System?

Answer 5

Perform and record daily routine, monitor status of operations. Data feeds to MIS/DSS.

Question 6

What is Management information (MIS) System?

Answer 6

Report on current performance based on TPS

Question 7

What is Decision Support (DSS) System?

Answer 7

Support non-routine decision making, using TPS/MIS information

Question 8

What is master data?

Answer 8

Data deemed to be the truth. The data warehouse integrates the master data

Question 9

Define: Database

Answer 9

• Collections of related data organised in a way 
that facilitates data searches 

• Transactional databases are not suitable for 
business analysis 

• Contain only current, not historical data 


Question 10

Define: Data Warehouse

Answer 10

• A large repository database that supports 
management decision making 

• Stores current and historical data from many core 
operational transaction systems 

• Consolidates and standardizes information for 
use across enterprise, but data cannot be altered 

• Data warehouse system will provide query, 
analysis, and reporting tools

Question 11

Define: Data mart

Answer 11

• Subset of data warehouse 

• Summarized or highly focused portion of firm’s 
data for use by specific population of users 

• Typically focuses on single subject or line of business

Question 12

What is data mining?

Answer 12

Complements OLAP by using complex algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data to find hidden predictive relationships

Question 13

What is OLAP?

Answer 13

Online analytical processing- process of quickly conducing complex multidimensional analyses of data in a database
aka complex search/analysis of a database