Assessment Brief: BIS2006 Management Information Systems Trimester 2, 2024 Assessment Overview
|
Assessment Task
|
Type |
Weighting |
Length |
Due |
ULOs Assessed |
|
Assessment 1: Quiz Online quiz of key content areas |
Individual
|
40% |
30 mins (equiv. 1000 words)
|
Week 3, |
ULO-1 ULO-2 ULO-3 ULO-4 ULO-5 |
|
Assessment 2: Case |
Individual
|
30% |
2500 words |
Week 6 |
ULO-1 ULO-2 ULO-3 |
|
Assessment 3: Case
|
|
30%
|
3000 words
|
Week 12
|
ULO-3 ULO-4 ULO-5 |
Group
Assessment 1: Online Quiz
|
Due date: |
Week 3, 5, 7, 9 |
|
Group/individual: |
Individual |
|
Word count / Time |
30 minutes |
|
Weighting: |
40% |
|
Unit Learning |
ULO-1, ULO-2, ULO-3, ULO-4, ULO-5 |
Assessment Details:
These online quizzes will assess your knowledge of key content areas of learning materials from weeks 1 to 9. For successful completion of the quizzes, you are required to study the material provided (lecture slides, tutorials, and reading materials), engage in the unit’s activities, and participate in the discussion forums.
These quizzes will be completed online through the APIC Online Learning System (OLS).
Marking Information: There will be four quizzes conducted during trimester, each quiz will be marked out of 100 and weighted 10%, together, they will comprise a total of 40% of the total unit mark.
Assessment 2: Case Study-1
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Due date: |
Week 6 |
|
Group/individual: |
Individual |
|
Word count / Time |
2500 words |
|
Weighting: |
30% |
|
Unit Learning |
ULO-1, ULO-2, ULO-3 |
Assessment Details:
This assignment assesses the student’s application of theoretical learning to practical, real-world and/or simulated situations.
Mini Case Study
ShoeSmart
ShoeSmart is an online retail business founded by Achiles Bunion in 2010. The company decided to investigate a Business Intelligence (BI) solution to analyse around a million transactions from almost 100,000 customers in their database. To better understand what their customers want, they also like to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. Together with their BI system, they also hope it will give them insight on the needs of their customers so they can come up with new products/services.
The vision of the company is “to be the go-to online retail store for Australians for their shoe needs” by offering speed, convenience, choice, and price delivered to customer doors within 30 minutes or less. To speed up their warehouse and delivery operations, they currently use an RFID asset tracking system in their packing warehouses to speed up locating and allocating resources. They also use a proprietary GPS system that allow their delivery drivers to find the fastest routes to their destinations and avoid any delays.
One of their main competitors, FootFriend recently used analytics to build a data-centric approach to its business. For example, the initial reports produced by their BI system identified that Nike Air, Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star and Adidas Superstar were their most popular shoes in the last quarter of 202x. As a result, they’ve realised that Big Data could reveal insights they don’t know before which could even create new sources of revenue for the business.
“We had a lot of data coming from our point-of-sales software. Initially, the challenge was how to a develop a quick way to talk to the company’s POS database. After they found an easy way to access the data, their next challenge was to drill down into the information in ways that would positively impact business results. Our goal was to use the huge amount of transaction data in a cost-effective way and find the right metrics to help us drive our business forward,” said Tibilias Talus, vice president of R&D and analytics at FootFriend.
FootFriend use Tableau to crunch its data. Tableau is a data visualization software focused on business intelligence. Tableau is a powerful and fastest growing data visualization tool. It helps in simplifying raw data into the very easily understandable format in the form of dashboards and worksheets. Tableau is cost-effective as it only cost them $70 per month for the subscription. After rolling out their Big Data strategy, FootFriend have nearly doubled their annual sales to $878,850 and welcomed an additional 15,000 customers in 202x, a 10% increase in total customer count.
In contrast, ShoeSmart used Microsoft Access but eventually used SQL to talk directly to the company’s POS database. Luckily, they have an in-house IT personnel specialising in SQL who made all the necessary queries and reports that they need for organisational decision-making. However, they are now in need of an analytics software that could make reports in an understandable format in the form of dashboards and worksheets to help simplify decision-making. Hence, they are currently investigating the possibility of also using Tableau and have hired an external consultant to help them in this regard.
ShoeSmart said that the three foremost analytics questions they asked:
• How can we further improve our services?
• How do we reduce delivery times?
• How can we find hidden needs and fill up with new products and services?
The problems they are facing include information silos, decentralised data, lack of data analytics and visualisation strategies, lack of business intelligence skilled personnel and lack of customer relationship management system solution.
Initial investigation revealed that possible CRM solutions includes cloud-based CRM such as Zoho CRM, Salesforce, SugarCRM or Monday.com. However, they are still at a lost whether to go proprietary or open-source, and assuming they will use Tableau as their BI system, will it interface well with their CRM solution of choice? They would like you to help them in this regard.
Once you formulated your recommendation solution, you now need to provide a critique of the proposed solution. Your critique should include a discussion of the features of the proposed enterprise CRM solution, its functions in support of business processes, such as its ability to produce customer insight reports, including a justification of its “fitness” to the organisational needs, such as alignment to the company’s strategic goals (such as, will this CRM solution help better understand customer needs?). It may also include cost/benefit calculations, such as ROI, payback analysis, and Net Present Value (NPV). Also, will the proposed CRM solution interface well with Tableau?
You are required to describe the role of information systems in supporting operations and organisational decision making (ULO-1), discuss the features of enterprise systems and their functions to support business processes (ULO-2), and critique the alignment of an organisation’s information systems strategy and business strategy (ULO-3).
The following areas should be covered in your assignment using the case study context:
1. Provide a brief description of the organisation
2. Provide a description of the current information systems problems (e.g., information silos, lack of BI capabilities, etc) and describe the role of information systems in supporting operations and organisational decision making (e.g., creation of dashboards and worksheets)
3. Discuss the features of enterprise systems and their functions to support business processes and how its implementation will provide real benefits to organisation (e.g., competitive advantage, improved customer traffic, improved sales and profit, etc)
4. Critique the information system solutions proposed. Are they aligned to the company’s business strategic vision?
5. A report of 2500 words summarising your analysis must be submitted by the due date. Reasonable assumptions are allowed.
Penalty for Late submission: a deduction of 5% of the total mark shall be imposed on each of the next subsequent days.
Submission requirements
1. Use a typical report structure, with a Cover Page, Table of Contents, Introduction, Body, Recommendation/Conclusion and References format. Executive Summary is not required in this report.
2. The References are excluded in the word count.
3. The Cover Page should clearly indicate the name of the person submitting the report and the word count.
4. You can use each question above as Headings in the Body of your report.
5. All References should reflect quality citations from relevant academic journals and adhere to the correct Harvard format (Wikipedia NOT allowed).
Marking Information: The Case Study-1 will be marked out of 100 and will be weighted 30% of the total unit mark.
Marking Criteria and Rubric
|
Marking Criteria |
Not satisfactory (0-49%) of the criterion mark) |
Satisfactory (50-64%) of the criterion mark |
Good (65-74%) of the criterion mark |
Very Good (75-84%) of the criterion mark |
Excellent (85-100%) of the criterion mark |
|
Introduction and organisation Brief organisation
(10%)
|
Fails to |
Provides a general overview
|
Provides a good overview of
|
Provides a very good
|
Provides an
|
|
Problem Analysis Description of the current problems |
Fails to |
Provides a general description with very limited analysis of the |
Provides a |
Provides a
|
Provides an outstanding |
|
and decision making
(25%)
|
|
organisational |
|
|
|
|
Discussion of proposed systems/ solutions Discuss the features of
(25%)
|
Fails to provide adequate discussion of the
|
Provides a |
Provides a |
Provides a description of the features of to
|
Provides an outstanding
|
|
Critical review
Review the role of business intelligence and
(20%)
|
Fails to provide adequate review the role of
|
Provides a general review
|
Provides a |
Provides a detailed review
|
Provides an outstanding
|
|
Structure and organization How
(10%) |
Does not |
States a |
States a |
Presents |
Develops a |
|
Writing Quality & Adherence to Format Guidelines
(10%) |
Report shows a below punctuation, spelling, usage, and/or
|
Report |
Report |
Report shows above average punctuation, |
Report is well written and clear using Harvard guidelines |
Assessment 3: Case Study-2
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Due date: |
Week 12 |
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Group/individual: |
Group (max 3 |
|
Word count / Time |
3000 words |
|
Weighting: |
30% |
|
Unit Learning |
ULO-3, ULO-4, ULO-5 |
Assessment Details:
Read the case study and the article below, then complete the report requirements at the end. To answer the report requirements provided, you will need to conduct further research about the topic (read the article below see the list of references included for further research).
Case Study
CyberTaxi
CyberTaxi is a transportation service that was rolled out in 200X after its founder, Raydon Karr couldn’t get a taxi in New York during a snowstorm one December night. It originated from the idea, “What if you could request a ride from your phone?”
Today, CyberTaxi boasts an annual revenue of over $11 billion, a market capitalisation rate of $80 billion, and over 20,000 employees. With 100 million global customers and three million dedicated drivers in 80 countries, CyberTaxi has been a legitimate game-changer in the taxi services market.
CyberTaxi wanted to make it easy as 1-2-3 to get a ride. Customers just need to do is to open their mobile phone, tap a button, and find an affordable ride in minutes. This is aligned to the company’s vision and mission which is to “getting a ride is as easy as saying 1-2-3” and ”to be the number one taxi service for travellers all over the world.” To achieve their vision, they need to align their business strategy with their IT strategy. But how?
What CyberTaxi has exposed is that companies can transform a business if they engage with customers more effectively. But getting that engagement is tough. According to Mack Cartrip, chief systems architect for CyberTaxi, “Each person connecting to CyberTaxi is having a unique experience with highly personalised data.” To solve this problem, the company decided to implement a “Customer Relationship Management” or CRM. It’s called CRM software because there is systematic data collection and organisation and uses this information to predict customer’s buying behaviour and habits. It focuses on analysing customer data, anticipating their wishes or requirements, finding new needs, and recovering those who have left. In the same way, it works to make a positive change in profitability, with the increase in sales through personalised campaigns.
Businesses that began to systematise their operations with this type of system retain their customers since there is a balanced collaboration between marketing, customer service and sales. They have also managed to expand their business, increasing their sales in an approximate range of 37%. CRM makes data collection an intuitive process that determines when a lead needs a service or when it’s appropriate to launch a promotion. Another benefit of CRM is that the conversations generated are always personalised, relevant, and up to date producing a 45% increase in customer satisfaction.
CRM systems offer a range of capabilities that helped CyberTaxi to effectively manage their operations and customer interactions. Some of the key capabilities include:
• Customer data tracking and analysis: CRM was used to track customer data such as pick-up and drop-off locations, ride history, and contact information, allowing them to gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs and preferences.
• Dispatch and scheduling: CRM are integrated with GPS and mapping technology, allowing CyberTaxi to schedule and dispatch drivers in real-time, improving efficiency and reducing wait times for customers.
• Payment and billing: CRM are integrated with payment platforms, allowing CyberTaxi to easily process payments and generate invoices for customers.
• Customer communication: CRM allow CyberTaxi to centralise customer communication, making it easy to respond to customer inquiries and resolve any issues that may arise. They can monitor tweets to find out their customers’ experience regarding their journeys, delays, and so on. They then identify negative tweets and does what’s necessary to remedy the situation. By publicly addressing these issues and offering solutions, it helps them build good customer relations.
• Reporting and analytics: CRM provide detailed reports and analytics on customer interactions, rides, and revenue, allowing transportation companies to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. For example, prescriptive analytics can be used to maximize an CyberTaxi’s profit. This type of analytics is used to build an algorithm that will automatically adjust the taxi fares based on numerous factors, including customer demand, weather, destination, holiday seasons, and petrol prices.
By utilising these capabilities, CyberTaxi can improve their customer relationships, streamline operations, increase revenue, and gain a competitive advantage in the transportation industry.
“Another challenge is that CyberTaxi cannot afford a system failure. Ever,” said Cartrip. “If a CyberTaxi customer cannot get an CyberTaxi car, then they will switch to another app. There is no brand loyalty. The systems must always work.”
Cartrip lists three key areas that CyberTaxi needs for a fully redundant system:
• Performance: What types of tests do you run to ensure that your systems keep running?
• Data: How can data operate in an environment where a data connection is intermittent?
• Future proofing: What technologies does CyberTaxi invest in to improve efficiencies in its systems?
A common thread through all of CyberTaxi ‘s systems is performance, performance, and performance. Each technology is chosen because it is the most stable and delivers the fastest response. In addition to this, CyberTaxi looks to ensure that tools work independently of each other and are destructible. To this end, CyberTaxi actively attempts to crash its systems, including networks, databases, and APIs. The system must work even when it is down.
The level of performance does not stop at the server. The communication channel, or RPC, is also modified. CyberTaxi’s version is called TChannel. It is based on Twitter’s multiplex RPC protocol, Mux. CyberTaxi needed to invent its own RPC communication channel because it supports more languages than Twitter. Cartip added, “We are even looking to replace HTTP+JSON, a typical REST API, with Thrift, as our tests are showing that it is 20 times faster. We need all the speed we can get.”
Performance for CyberTaxi goes to extremes with data. The typical data structure for a company is a relational database. The problem that CyberTaxi sees with relational databases is that the whole system can come down if the database is not available. CyberTaxi uses Big Data tools and techniques as a foundation for its technologies, with tools such as Hadoop, MongoDB, Talend, Cassandra, STORM, Kafka, Spark, and MySQL. Also, the company is extending MySQL with its distributed column store to orchestrate the data processes.
They also use Analytics as a business intelligence solution to help them understand their business, make informed decisions, and measure the impact of the changes they make. Analytics shows what’s working and what’s not, from start to finish, across the entire business, all in real time. They will analyse several different factors, such as population, demographics, location, and more. With visualization tools like Tableau, Big Data analysts at CyberTaxi can produce graphic visualisations of the analysis. In the past, they use Excel to uncover opportunities in the business, but extracting data can be difficult as can drawing meaningful conclusions. Also, Excel data focuses on what has happened in the past…it’s like looking in the rear-view mirror. With business intelligence, processing of this big data is in real- time, gaining instant awareness and act when it matters most. For example, Analytics provides several insights to the drivers by showing them exactly which zones are underserved and offer the greatest opportunity to increase their earnings. Analytics also help them detect, anticipate, and respond to opportunities to engage customers anytime, anywhere. It allows them to deliver targeted promotions to customers based on booking volume, location, time since last booking or to reward (or encourage) loyalty. They can personalise their promotions based on situational awareness by including reference to past and present customer behaviour and events. For example, as a customer completes their journey home on a Friday evening, there’s a good chance they will require a taxi home later on the weekend as they go out with friends. So instead of sending a standard ‘thank you’ text, the system sends them a $3 off voucher code that’s only valid that weekend – ensuring they choose CyberTaxi fleet later. With Analytics the firm was able to segment their customer base not only by the regularity of their bookings, but to cross-reference that with those who had not booked via app. The promotional text was therefore two-fold in its intention – it both rewarded loyalty and offered a link to download the company’s app… which in turn led to more repeat bookings from those customers at a volume greater than before AND those bookings were now automated via the app.
CyberTaxi uses drivers’ phones as the method of distributing data, achieving a kind of “super distributed computing.” The result is that stress on replicating data is eliminated from the data centres. The trick is achieved by the phone checking in with a server every four seconds to receive an encrypted digest. If a server does not respond, the phone moves to a new server. The whole data environment is redundant. Also, the more drivers, the more redundancy is added to the system.
In addition to the core supply-and-demand dispatch systems, CyberTaxi does have a third system: Disco. Cartrio said, “Disco is the dispatch optimisation system. Disco’s main function is to match supply with demand. Disco, however, allows CyberTaxi to investigate the future. We can match predictive supply and demand, whereas our old system could only match what we knew then.” The advantage Disco provides CyberTaxi is clear: Through data, CyberTaxi can help busy drivers keep efficiently picking up riders. To do this, CyberTaxi needs a global index that requires a massive amount of data: over 1 million writes per second. CyberTaxi is using Google’s S2 Geometry Library to break down the data and get it out. This library is designed to split data into smaller geographical sections. The result is that each section is not handling only the writes for that geographical location. This in turns helps the company send drivers rapid updates on where riders are located and provide more accurate ETAs for trips. It also gives CyberTaxi the opportunity to expand its business into a specific geography.
You Tasks:
After reading the case study above and conducting further research, you now need to answer the following research requirements below.
1. Critique the alignment between CyberTaxi’s information systems strategy and business strategy.
a. Identify the strategic vision and mission of the company
b. Identify the IT solutions they use to manage their operations (e.g., CRM, Business
Intelligence (BI), etc)
c. Answer the question, “Are they able to meet their strategic vision using their current IT solutions?” Why? Why not? Justify your answer.
2. Critically review the role of business intelligence and business analytics in supporting business decision making at CyberTaxi.
a. Describe how they are using their current BI tools to make business decisions (e.g., Analytics, Tableau).
b. Answer the question, “Are they able to make good data-driven decisions using Analytics and their BI tool?” Why? Why not? Justify your answer.
3. Review and evaluate contemporary tools and techniques for accessing information from databases to improve business performance (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, STORM, etc)
4. A report of 3000 words summarising your analysis must be submitted by the due date. Reasonable assumptions are allowed.
Penalty for Late submission: a deduction of 5% of the total mark shall be imposed on each of the next subsequent days.
Submission requirements
1. Use a typical report structure, with a Cover Page, Table of Contents, Executive Summary, Introduction, Body, Recommendation/Conclusion and References format. Since this is a group project made up of a maximum of 3 people, you need to allocate sections of the report to a specific group member and should be clearly identified in the report. You will be given separate marks based on how well you contributed to your allocated research area. For example:
|
Report section |
Mark |
Person responsible |
|
Executive Summary/Introduction/Conclusion |
10 marks |
All group members |
|
Critique of alignment between CyberTaxi’s information systems strategy and business strategy |
20 marks |
{Name of group member} |
|
Critical review of the role of business intelligence and CyberTaxi |
20 marks |
{Name of group member} |
|
Review and evaluate contemporary tools and techniques for |
20 marks |
{Name of group member} |
2. The Executive Summary and the References are excluded in the word count.
3. The Cover Page should clearly indicate the names of each person in the group and the word count.
4. You can use task above as Headings in the Body of your report, and after the question is the name of the group member(s) who discussed that topic. For example, “Alignment between CyberTaxi’s information systems strategy and business strategy” by Jaspreet Singh.
5. All References should reflect quality citations from relevant academic journals and adhere to the correct Harvard format (Wikipedia NOT allowed). If you want to get the maximum marks in referencing, you must correctly follow the correct standard format (Harvard) and must provide at least 5 journal references.
6. This is how I will mark the Writing Quality & Adherence to Format Guidelines:
|
Report is well written and clear and standard English |
5 marks |
|
Used correct Harvard guidelines and at least 5 journal |
5 marks |
|
Free from grammar, punctuation, spelling, usage, or |
5 marks |
Marking Information: The Case study-2 will be marked out of 100 and will be weighted 30% of the total unit mark.
Marking rubric:
|
Marking Criteria |
Not satisfactory (0-49%) of the criterion mark |
Satisfactory (50-64%) of the criterion mark |
Good (65-74%) of the criterion mark |
Very Good (75-84%) of the criterion mark |
Excellent (85-100%) |
|
Introduction about the case
(10 marks) |
Introduction |
Introduction |
Introduction is presented
|
Introduction |
Introduction |
|
Content Critical analysis of the strategy
(20 marks) |
Does not |
States an |
States an argument or point of view but organized logically. |
Presents an argument using evidence and /or level of |
Develops a clearly
|
|
Content Critically review the role making
(20 marks)
|
Does not |
States an |
States an argument or point of view but logically. |
Presents an argument using level of |
Develops a clearly articulated argument, reasoning |
|
Content Review and evaluate contemporary tools and techniques for accessing performance
(20 marks)
|
Does not |
States an |
States an argument or point of view but organized logically. |
Presents an argument using evidence and /or level of |
Develops a |
|
Structure and organization How |
Does not |
States an |
States an argument or point of view but logically. |
Presents |
Develops a |
|
critically problems are analysed
(15%) |
Problem situation is not critically analysed. |
problem situation is not that satisfactory. |
the |
with satisfactory level of critical analysis skills. |
point of view. The way problem analysed level of |
|
Writing Adherence Format
(15%) |
Report shows a below average/poor writing errors in spelling, grammar,
|
Report |
Report |
Report shows above average writing style and clarity in |
Report is |