Business problem: Imagine that you are a newly hired middle manager for an online office supplies
company. You have a background in data analytics and so you understand big data issues as well as
how to manage an analytics team. Your employer routinely collects sales data from different regions of
Australia and the executives of the company have asked you to report on the results for the period
2013 to 2016. This means that the sales data must be analysed, visualised and a report written.
On this occasion you decide to analyse the data for yourself and report to the executives. Given that this
is a routine task and analyses should be done preferably every six months, rather than waiting for four
years, you want to provide advice on how this task may be done in the future.
In particular, the analysis of sales data could be considered a project and therefore there are implications
associated with its management. You might also consider outsourcing the analysis next time, and
consequently you would need to consider the risks and costs related to that decision. On the other hand,
if you keep the analysis in house, you would need to decide what software to buy/build.