Business-Driven Decision-Making Exercises

1. Your organization has a major problem in collecting on overdue accounts receivable with $10 million in outstanding debt. As a result, it is considering making a $100,000 investment to improve the accuracy of its accounts receivable data. Based on results of competitors in your industry, you can expect to collect about 30% of the outstanding debt or $3 million by accurately identifying contact data for non-paying customers. The remaining $7 million of outstanding debt would be turned over to a collection agency. The expected recovery rate is 25%. How much of the outstanding debt would be recovered through a combination of data quality improvement and collection agency efforts? How much debt would be recovered if the entire $10 million in outstanding debt were turned over to the collection agency? What is the additional net revenue generated from a combination of data quality improvement and collection agency efforts?
2. Ticketmaster is a global ticket retailer selling hundreds of millions of tickets to every type of show and venue with total revenue exceeding $8 billion/year. In 2010, it merged with Live Nation to become Live Nation Entertainment. Customer demand for tickets is very uneven with extremely high demand during the first hours of ticket availability for a popular event, followed by a significant decline in demand. This results in a very uneven demand on computing resources which is difficult to meet. In addition, any system downtime is extremely expensive and can result in lost sales approaching $1 million per hour.16,17 What are the pros and cons for Ticketmaster to move its database operations to a Database as a Service provider? What potential data management issues might arise in this transition? Who should be involved in making this decision?