Data to Information

• The data is about moving from data to information and beyond
• This includes discussion on the essentials, excel, learning objectives, and technology
• Discusses Walmart, data types, output query and reporting tools, tradeoffs and bonus content

The Essentials

• Data turns into information in the context of human activity
• Because consistency is desired in many activities, ways are built to keep things consistent
• There are many sources of data
• This is chosen for human activities
• And based on what human activities make possible or profitable
• Choices are needed on how resources are spent on data and information
• Options are about what these choices are

Examples to Build On

• FreshDirect, TiVo, Gmail/Yahoo! Mail/Hotmail, Intel & disruptive technologies, Intuit, and 3D Printing
• There are cryptocurrencies and their fiascos
• Disney Bands and Chip manufacturing are mentioned
• E-waste in the USA
• Different methods of getting computing power: Supercomputers, Cloud/SaaS/server farms, multicore processors, parallel computing

Issues with Technology

• Information technology has a pervasive nature
• Technology provides affordances to operations
• Activities can be coordinated, allowing things not previously possible with price flexibility
• Technology changes activities radically
• To keep up, some might outsource, ceding control to other organizations
• Strategic planning is difficult
• Uses 5 Forces and other means of analysis
• Important definitions help identify important issues in management
• Technology brings disruptive innovations
• It starts without widespread value, and becomes significantly valued

MS Excel

• Skills include creating documents, cutting/copying/pasting, cell references, logical operators and basic functions
• More skills include cell formatting, protecting sheets, hiding/unhiding and splitting the view, with filtering

Textbook Learning Objectives Sections

• Standardized data, 3rd party datasets, cheap/fast computing, and easy-to-use software enable a new age of decision-making
• Data-driven, fact-based decision-making benefits enterprises
• Knowing the difference between data and information is important
• Need to know the key terms and technologies associated with data organization and management
• Need to understand internal and external sources for enterprise data
• Recognize data aggregators, third-party data leveraging, strategic implications of relying on external data and key issues associated with sources data
• Organizations have data that can't be converted to actionable information for known reasons
• Transactional databases cannot always be queried effectively
• Need to understand what needs to be done for effective data use for analytics and business intelligence
• Recognizing the key issues around data and privacy legislation is necessary
• Data warehouses and data marts and the purpose they serve needs to be understood
• What issues need to be addressed to design, develop, deploy, and maintain data warehouses and data marts is necessary
• Recognize and understand technologies behind “Big Data,” how they differ from conventional data management approaches, and how they are used for organizational benefit

Technology and Walmart

• Walmart is the largest retailer in the world

• Walmart has been in and out of the top spot on the Fortune 500 list

• In three months, the company sells more than a whole year's worth of sales at Home Depot

• Almost half of US citizens visit a Walmart in any given week

• Key competitive advantage: scale

• Benefit: even with a smaller margin, a lot is being made

• If you want to do business, Walmart can give you a large volume of sales

• Challenge: coordinate this volume of activity, make sure the data management costs don't exceed the revenue of the sales

• The core of the value chain activities is keeping product stocked, prompting customers to return often, and prompting customers to buy efficiently

Walmart's info systems

• At the store, their Retail Link records sales and automatically triggers inventory reordering, scheduling, and deliveries
• It adjusted for the delivery time of each individual product and projected rate at which that product will move off the shelf
• Back-office scanners keep track of inventory as supplier shipments come in with regular inventory checks
• Scheduling software for deliveries does this in less than 10 minutes
• In the warehouse, it developed robots and other automated systems to facilitate distribution
• Includes taking from and to trucks, wrapping product into pallets, and storing/ retrieving
• Developed AI-driven image recognition systems to scan boxes
• Includes identifying products in boxes, determining dimensions, and passing data to systems that select optimal stack locations
• Before an order, suppliers guarantee (high) restock rates
• Suppliers attach Walmart-ready RFID to products

The Data and Its Management

• Environmental conditions predict delivery time of goods
• Consumer research to predict purchase rates
• There is a huge trove of data that is too big for standard data structures
• Relies on Hadoop to store and retrieve data for future targeted use
• Data is shared with suppliers when Walmart seems it is relevant
• Information not sold to brokers, therefore competitors
• Walmart is large enough to not require network effects of buying information from data brokers
• Walmart now has a massive, multi-billion dollar advertising business
• Ad business was $2.7 billion in 2022
• The margins on ads are far better than traditional retail, 80 percent
• Ads are available in stores
• Over 170,000 ad-showing screens are throughout the firm's 4,600+ stores
• Advertisers can purchase thirty-second ad spots broadcast over in-store speakers
• Ads are on the website and apps
• An ad opportunity similar to what Amazon offers to producers
• E-commerce is now a focus
• Jet.com was purchased in 2016 for $3.3 billion (USD)
• E-commerce sales increased 63 percent y-o-y
• Increased the number of products sold from 10 to 67 million items
• Invested $19.5 billion (USD) over several years to acquire an 80 percent share of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce firm
• Owns a majority stake in PhonePe, India's largest fintech startup and competitor to Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Walmart's gives demands weight and efficiences go to shareholders
• The company's low prices lead producers to cannibalizing sales to other retailers with more favorable contracts
• Walmart low prices mean other retailers cannot compete, damaging competition space

Data Types

• Data is stored as a collection of binary states for computing
• Includes to possible values that are 0 and 1
• It's likely that the data is stored in a physical region and that region is scanned for the presence of a certain feature (1) or its absence (0)
• There is no one way to assign meaning to a collection of things that might identify ads a binary record
• Encoding or decoding is done by convention
• Some conventions are better for some purposes
• This information system is not just the IT its rules, but also the people involved and how they carry out activities
• MS Office identifies a number of data types: A standard for data storage/retrieval (Limits, protocols)

MS Office Data Types

• MS Office identifies a number of data types through a standard for how data is stored/retrieved (limits, protocols)
• Fundamental data types: Boolean (true or false), Byte (0 to 255), Currency (scaled integer), Date, Decimal, Double (double-precision floating-point), integer, and Long (long integer)
• Fundamental data types also include; LongLong (8 bytes, runs on 64-bit platforms, only), Single (single-precision floating-point), String (variable or fixed length)
• Special Data Types: Collection, Dictionary, Object, and Variant

Data Types In Excel

• Excel identifies the some kind of data types
• This is stored in different treatments
• Excel expands on the underlying data types
• Data types come with a set of available formats and customizations for display
• Excel offers some functions specific to using certain data types, and for translating values
• Select a cell and choose format cell action
• Can see list of important data types number format
• Can see formatting options with the types

Information Arises With Activity

• Brute facts don't mean anything if we don't notice them
• Noticing doesn't mean anything if we don't attach importance to it
• Importance comes from yourself and other people
• Different things are found as important based on different tasks Organizations are trying to get as much data as possible on you
• They try to make it more important to benefit them Promote sales, make exchanges more satisfactory and increase price flexibility
• The influential decisions can be very personal
• “Why Even Your Local Grocery Store Wants Your Digital Data" exists"

Working Towards the Metrics

• Remember The McNamara Fallacy
• The used data is not deal
• A metric is sometimes used because it’s all that can be collected
• If reward is based on a metric, it's an incentive structure
• An incentive structure may follow in detriment
• Fee for service: action taken based on metric is increase revenue for a doctor based on metric, physicians want to recommend more services
• Doctors are more likely to serve interventions that improve life of a patient - can pursue revenue more than necessary
• The fee for patient health outcome metric is how many of a doctor’s patients see improvement
• How many hospital days does a doctor’s patient see
• Action = increase of rev based on increase/decrease

Outcome Model

• Doctors need a measureable, improved outcome
• They want patients to have shorter hospital stays - and produce measurable improvement
• Avoid high hospital stays, the elderly and other bad outcomes from those with illness
• Systems/data creation are based off data, and current needs/interests
• This is not compatible old/new data

Data Architecture

• How data is structured and retrieved is useful in tables.

• Think of an Excel sheet, build the data on those special relation rules/tables

• For example, a cooking might have relationships with ingredients and recipes and more

• Protocol data is stored and retrieved

• For this cooking data, authors access the tables, the cook accesses it, and the data is available

Volume Challenge - Collecting

• Easy to record sale, tough to search and filter a million record table sale related things
• Include product and customer research as needed

Working with Large Amounts of Data

• Data is prioritized for retrieval, along with prioritization Big data is the collect of information in different table based structures 3 vs: velocity, variety and volume

Feature Deals

• Some feature deals includes data lakes, third party data providers, TPS, and more
• Some organizations do not have the lakes
• Lakes include amount of unstructured data and skills
• Warehouse data includes all the data in the easy format
• End users have access to request, and can pull from data with easier skill
• 4 feature deals are scalability, tolerance and effective
• lakes can hold data, structured or not
• System growth needs to be more powerful
• Use of system means better price
• Structured system is resistant to all errors

Functionality

• Data is associated with excel
• Formatting, filtering, and automating systems help with that

Query and Reporting Tools

• Interrogate a database to provide a sub sets of information
• The tools are reporting data and allowing channel/limited customers
• 4 trade off traits, are scope, affordance, agility and speed with the volume data
• Standard languages ​​grants power to investigate data and requires training
• There are Graphical user interface or point or drag-and-drop click in the data sets
• It enables creation (sacrifically) for aid
• Cannons of data has summaries/formats
• It is easy to use and requires oversight, with select fields, that sacrifice use of data/fields
• Design also new reports based on information, along with affordable design
• dashboards has displays (graphic, critical glance at metric, or simple language) with tableu

Bonus Content

• tips for storage, data structure, and retrieval practices
• To deny (damage) retailers return of a customer, the track and sell those peoples information (equation).