First, review the Week 1 topics located in 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 and answer the following questions.

You are a new business intelligence analyst for your organization in response to the marketing and operations managers, along with the board of directors, declaring the need for an analyst and the investment of the RStudio tool for the analysis of data and creating data visualizations. As you are starting your new position within the organization, you have been scheduled to have a meeting with the CEO of the organization who wants to understand why data is important to the marketing and operations managers of the organization. He/she also wants to understand how does visualization play a role in the overall reporting process within the organization. Finally, he/she wants to know how does RStudio help in creating data visualizations from the data and why is this tool so important with respect to business intelligence. He/she has asked you to prepare a paragraph written response addressing these three questions to the CEO.

Business Intelligence (BI) does help with the process of improving safety, reducing variation, and eliminating waste. It also can help in some businesses to maximize revenues.

In the past couple of decades, many organizations have used data warehousing to analyze data. The data warehouse DW has the following primary functions: 

(a) It is a direct, straightforward reflection of the actual business rules of the organizational enterprise. 

(b) it is the collection point for planned and tactical strategic information. 

(c) it is the historical storage place for this tactical strategic information. 

(d) it is the source of information that is later delivered to future data marts. 

(e) it is the source of steady, unchanging, stable data, regardless of how the business processes may change over time (Marakas, 2002). 

A data mart is a smaller, more focused data warehouse. It reflects the business rules of a specific business unit. Now you may ask how business intelligence today might differ than data warehouses in the past. Let us explore this difference. There are many companies in the turbulent marketplace today that are competing in very dynamic markets, and these companies have to continuously attract new potential customers and maintain the interest of both new and existing customers with new approaches, techniques, and methods that meet the demanding needs and wants of their customers. Companies have to cater to customers who are getting continually spoiled by the multitude of offerings available to them from competitors. A few decades ago, decision support systems (DSS) were deployed to enable companies to cater to their customers' needs. Today, a new category of management information systems is being deployed to help organizations understand all aspects of running their operations and to help them better deal with their clients. This new suite of tools is collectively referred to as business intelligence (BI), and it has become one of the hottest topics in management information systems today. Let us also add that it is hard to adequately take the pulse of trends without using business intelligence and performing data-analysis work.

We need to update BI periodically which is why an agile approach is important. Let me now say that the starting point in BI is the sources of data. Although organizations can acquire data from secondary sources, such as the marketplace, most have enough data in their operational databases to satisfy their analysis needs. All of an organization's transaction information is stored in traditional transaction processing systems.