BUS5PB – Principles of Business Analytics

Assignment: Investigating the Analytics Landscape

Marks: 100%

Assignment Type: Individual

The first assignment provides an opportunity to investigate the analytics landscape in business organisations through research and review of relevant resources.

The assignment consists of two activities,

Activity 1: Current context

Conduct a research study on one of the following topics of business analytics. In your study, focus on the interplay between the different forms of analytics (descriptive, inferential, predictive and prescriptive).

• A detailed study of analytics in a particular industry domain, e.g., telecommunications, finances, banking, education, not-for-profit organizations, etc.

• A case study of various business analytics initiatives undertaken by organizations: why they succeed or fail

Activity 2: Emerging trends

Conduct a research study on one of the emerging trends of business analytics,

• Big Data analytics

• Mobile analytics

• Business analytics and the Internet of Things

• Business analytics and cognitive computing

• Any other notable emerging trend

You are to conduct a comprehensive literature search on your chosen topics, collate and analyse your findings/readings, identify the key areas you wish to discuss and compile a professionally written report (of varying word limits, details given below) as your assignment submission.

Report guidelines

1. Each report should contain an appropriate title that captures both topics. (A (not-so creative) example: A research report on analytics in Finance and Mobile analytics)

2. The report should contain an executive summary that provides an overview of the content on each topic.

3. The body of the report should contain a ‘table of contents’, ‘introduction’, logically organized subsections on each topic, a ‘conclusion’ and a ‘list of references’.

4. You may include diagrams, tables and charts – these do not count towards the word limit.

5. You are free to choose what percentage of the report will focus on each topic.

6. The length of the assignment excludes table of contents and references. When using length as a guide, the assessor will consider if the submission is reasonably succinct. That is, long article with little content will result in a lower grade than a shorter article covering about the same amount of content.

7. Word limit: no less than 4000 words