Online Business Intelligence - Fall 2025

Summary of the Lecture Networks are collections of entities and the relationships among them, representing systems of interconnected elements. In social contexts, networks are often described as social structures composed of entities (vertices or nodes) and their relationships (edges). Nodes represent entities such as people or organizations, while edges represent the connections between them. Edges can be directed or undirected, weighted or unweighted, depending on the type of connection. Networks are crucial for studying complex systems, including information diffusion, relationship formation, disease spread, financial crises, and trends on social media. Companies like Facebook and Google utilize network analysis extensively to understand user behavior and innovation patterns. Networks can be categorized as single-mode networks, which contain only one type of vertex, or two-mode networks, where the vertices represent two different types of entities. The analysis of networks relies on...

Summary of the Lecture Web analytics are essential for businesses that want to measure, collect, analyze, and report internet data in order to understand and optimize how users interact with their websites. By examining both qualitative and quantitative data from their own site and from competitors, businesses can strengthen their operations and improve how they reach customers. The web analytics cycle, which consists of setting goals, measuring, reporting, analyzing, and optimizing, provides a structured approach that helps organizations continually refine their website performance and user experience. A core part of web analytics involves answering the Five W’s: what users are doing on the website, who they are, when they visit, where they are coming from, and why they behave the way they do. These insights help businesses understand customer behavior, identify their target audience, and recognize which products or services matter most to visitors. Related to this is understanding th...

Summary of the Lecture Dashboards are an effective visual interface that allows organizations to tell a story about their data. They provide quick yet detailed insights into key performance indicators that users need to monitor. As we learned in the lecture, dashboards serve as quantitative measures of market, business, operational, or project performance. They offer visibility into critical metrics such as product delivery times, productivity levels, and customer satisfaction rates. Dashboards often display both baseline and actual values, allowing users to compare planned versus real-time results as projects progress. For example, a business unit may estimate the time required to complete a task (baseline) and then track the actual completion time. Comparing these values helps identify gaps, lessons learned, and opportunities for process improvement. Over time, this enhances scheduling accuracy and overall project planning. Dashboard Types and Best Practices Dashboards have become in...