Business Intelligence in the Cardiff Websites - Case Study Example

? Business Intelligence Part At the time being, the Cardiff and company run more than nine websites. Most of these are designed purposely for marketing the vast opportunities that Cardiff presents for investors, the locals and visitors. The range of topics that have to be covered in presenting detailed information about Cardiff necessitated the development of several websites. The decision to divide the websites is informed by the need for delegation and fragmentation. Each website addresses a single issue exhaustively. This is because the issues presented are independent and, hence, the user base is varied. For instance, a tourist may not necessarily be interested in issues concerning education. The main issues covered by each of these websites include, education, investment opportunities, visitations and tours, live work and an events study. Additionally, the company runs a number of other websites on the very categories but in different other languages among which are Arabic, French, and Spanish. This is due to the fact that the target market for Cardiff is international and hence there is need to customize the websites to suit the target markets. In order to ensure that the websites are of value to the clients, some of the categories considered include: Education Education is a two-pronged economical scope. The Cardiff city hopes to become an academic center within the region. To achieve this, the envisioned city must work strategies capable of beating other modern day academic centers such as Liverpool and London. The city must therefore have schools running and education centers from kindergarten to the university. Theses academic institutions will need accreditation by government authorities to check that they meet the standards of quality (Bogomolova, 2011). The validity of the courses offered Cardiff city must be ascertained. Hence, it will be critical to have an independent body to ensure that the high quality academic standards are maintained and that educational standards are not compromised in any way. The website runs the opportunities that the education sector presents to potential investors. The most common investment opportunity in the academic sector is the setting up and management of private academic institutions. To this, the website target of the currently existing universities, such as Oxford and Liverpool among others, is to invest in the establishment of new campuses within the city. The website offers basic contact information on how interested parties conduct the transactions of obtaining land and other resources necessary for such developments. The company welcomes both local and foreign investors, thus the translation into different other languages. Additionally, the website targets potential students. The education sector primarily depends on the availability of students. Attracting students in the region becomes difficult since children school in regions habited by their parents. The company thus runs a number of other websites advertising other diverse investment opportunities with an aim of attracting as much residents into the city. This way, the basic level academic institutions are certain of pupils (Jiaming, 2008). Tertiary and university level are not much perturbed by the locality of parents. This is thus a level opportunity and depends on the advertisement potential of the company and the reputation of the subsequent universities that will eventually set up in the region. To ensure that the students of higher learning institutions are comfortable, the websites advertise the various recreational facilities that are available. These include parks, night clubs and other outdoor activities. On top of this, related websites showcase the opportunities available for part time work to suit students who need to make extra income. It is vital to note that the city targets established academic institutions due to their credibility. Most international students recognize institutions that are globally known hence it would be easy to attract them to Cardiff city. In this respect, the website will emphasize on the global recognition of the academic certifications in Cardiff city. Also, international universities present the city with people from various countries hence improving diversity of cultures. Visit, Meet, Invest and Shops These four are massive investment opportunities that the Cardiff and company seeks to capitalize in, the thus each have a separate website which are later translated into other three to four different languages depending on the position and locality of the target market. The Cardiff city hopes to become a number one tourist destination in the country and transform the outlook of Wales. This daunting task will require the involvement of different sector players. The company therefore runs the websites displaying the available natural attractions in the region and provides possible facelifts required in and around every one of them. The websites thus targets tycoons in England and around the world for opportunities in the unexploited hospitality industry. In order to attract tourists, the Visit website is designed in such a way it presents the best that Cardiff city has to offer to visitors. The websites have high definition videos that show the actual tourist attractions that can be observed in Cardiff city. Through the use of advanced graphics, the Visit website offers potential visitors a chance to conduct a virtual tour of the various attractions that are available in Cardiff city. This helps to give the website visitor a chance to feel like they have actually experienced what is on offer at Cardiff city. Also, the virtual tours make the website visitor more curious and interested on what the attractions that they see on the website. Thus, the use of technology helps to make the Visit website an efficient communication and advertisement tool. Also, by engaging the website visitor the site actively invokes real feelings unlike the static websites (Barret, 2003). In conjunction to the Visit website, the Meet websites offers a platform where interested parties meet and exchange ideas. In such social gatherings, the investors make possible business contracts geared towards the development of the city. Additionally, a chance to gather all the interested participants in the project further kick starts the development project, as most of these people will require boarding facilities while touring the virgin land. Additionally, the trainings serve as venues for training the investors and offering them both legal and social guidelines on the type of investments required in the facility. The shops provision in the website offers a number of services. The website displays the shops owned by the company and the services rendered in the shops. These purposely serve to attract potential clients to the good dispensed and services offered in the shops. They thus target possible visitors of the new city or interested residents. The other more important function is to attract potential developers and investors. This site runs potential opportunities on the types of shops required in the property as designed in the official blue print. This specifically target property developer and esteemed businesspersons. The investments required in the area are expensive and will require intense financial commitments from interested parties. The invest provision gives the detail of actual materialization of the investment opportunity. In this, the interested investor meets the company with an aim of leasing or buying the property. The site therefore contains contacts information and provides hyperlinks that make the investor meet the company. The website further runs the terms and conditions as they apply. Each investment opportunity has its unique demand and regulations. The website details all these so as to inform the potential client on the actual terms of acquisition of the property. After reading and understanding all these, the investor proceeds to meet the company and make payments for the property. By then, it is assumed that the investor has understands the terms and is therefore signing a legally binding document, making a legal commitment as espoused on terms of either lease or purchase. The use of Google Analytics The main aim of the Cardiff and Company project is to sell the idea to as many people throughout the world as possible. They are therefore trying their level best to make the product as visible as it can get. However, visibility of the brand and the product should attract investment in equal measure. The effectiveness of the websites developed by the company will not simply be measured by the number of visitors they receive a day, this statistics is very important but not at all of direct relevance to the creation of the websites. The effectiveness of the websites is thus calculated by comparing the number of visitors in each website and the number of potential investors who finally make credible inquiries into the products and services (Tabbush, 2011). To monitor the movement in and across its websites, Cardiff, and company use the Google Analyst, which is a service offered by Google. The service helps trace visitors of a website and offer links to their personal details such as email address and any other information made available through the inclusion of the email address. The service is offered freely and the service providers for free make its premium version available. Google Analyst is the most commonly used internet-tracking software. In collaboration with other search engines, the service tracks visitors from any reference or origin. This service is appropriate for this new company not only in showing the statistics of visitors but also in indicating the amount of visitors the websites receive. At initial stages, it is not expected that the project websites begin drawing in investors. The sheer number of visitors reflects the visibility that the project develops with each day. The tracking service indicates which site is frequently visited, this way the company learns of that which to include in an effort of attracting more visitors and thereby creating more visibility for the company and the new city. In this regards, the service thus becomes a freely available market research tool. It is easy to use and very convenient. The company also gets to learn of the services less required and may thereafter devise ways of repackaging them to ensure that they receive positive response from the target market (Iacobucci, 2012). In tracking visitors, the service helps the company run subsequent advertisements. The internet is not the only media through which the company may advertise the new city. However, advertising the entire plan on a radio or television channel may prove to be very costly especially is transmitted through the international channels such as the CNN and the BBC at prime times. However, with effective analysis of the movement of clients in their website, the company establishes the desirable products and or services for which it thus runs short effective adverts on other mainstream media such as newspaper and radio. The information obtained from Google analytics can help Cardiff and Company to launch marketing offensives that are effective and sustainable. This is because Google analytics provides a complete perspective of the nature and number of visitors that have interacted with a given website. For instance, the analytics can show the sequence in which a person browses the given pages on a website. After obtaining this information, advertisements can be prepared in such a way that they tell a story based on the preferences of the visitors of the website. It should be noted that the those who visit a website are representative of the population hence their habits can provide insight that is applicable to the larger population Besides the Google Analyst, there are a number of other online tracking services and service provider. Among the most common are the data miner, Surf Pattern Visual analyzer, and 11 Ants Model Builder. These facilities have different specifications and function differently. Each of them has diverse strengths and weaknesses. The 11 ants model builder for example presents the visitor history in an excel sheet. This is easier to analyze since one simply ties one visit to the other and the eventual origin of the visitor. However, the service is not stable and is not compatible to most windows operating systems used by most common computer users (Levesque, 2007). Of the entire available visitor tracking services, the Cardiff and company settles on the Google Analyst because this is the greatest of such service providers. It is built to be used by the most novices of all computer users. This gives it a simpler and an easier to mater user interface. It has fewer navigational aids and is therefore appropriate for a cooperate society, one which has unique population pattern. The service is additional free, the developers vendor its premium version freely. This makes it a cost effective service and quite qualitative. Part 2 The use of Google Analyst in monitoring movement in the Cardiff websites gives more information capable of being systematically analyzed to reveal other aspects of the potential clients directly useful in the marketing and promotional process, which is the main mandate of the company. In mining and analyzing the results from the tracking technology, the company statistically categorizes their visitors to determine the possibility of any visit materializing into a possible sale or business transaction. Some of the most common software and computer programs that help perform this include the 11ants build model (Levesque, 2007). The 11 Ant Build Model. The program is simple to use too. It is effective in data mining and presents its findings in an excel sheet format. This implies that the software is customizable to fit the unique requirements of the company. Its eventual results are thus tabulated as had previously been customized. In the spreadsheet cells, the company may opt to include such information as customer profiling. In this the program presents the basic information about the customer, some of these include the name of the customer and his locality among other basic details that are availed online. The software largely depends of the email address of the customer. Each emailing services require different information when signing up for an account. It is this information that the data-mining tool eventually retrieves. In geographical segmenting, the data mining tool categories the customers based on their locality. Such information is useful to the company in determining the ware bouts of the clients and any possible implications brought about by the local culture or religion of the customer (Wellman, 1988). Data mining is a systematic way of obtaining business intelligence from client data that a company is in possession of. In this case, Cardiff and Company can ensure that it gathers the necessary information of the people that visit the site. For instance, users can be asked to enter their email address and topic of interest as they log in into the website. Also, an easy to use feedback form should be available on the website. This information plus the user’s behavior on the website should be stored by the company for future analysis to give more business insight. The analysis of the data retrieved from the data-mining engine is important in determining the success of the entire process. There are a number of data analysis technologies, each of which present unique strengths and weaknesses. The choice on which to use further determines the success of the entire analysis. Some of these technologies include the Decision tree technique. This aligns the data based on importance. The most important comes to the top and as it moves down in branches, it continues to reveal the factors leading to the decision at the top. Just as the name suggests, it outlays its results in a possible tree structure with each factor leading to the development of a subsequent one put on top of theme. It progresses the factors these way to the final and most important of all placed on top of the rest (Argyrous, 2001). The tree is easy to interpret since one simply connects a factor to those arising right below it. This technology works best with the 11 Ant build model data mining technology which analyses presents its data on a spreadsheet. The cells of the spreadsheets are joined by common factors, which can subsequently be used to develop an effective decision tree. Once the tree is developed, the process of extracting business intelligence from the data can be easily done using the appropriate analytical tools. Some other technologies are equally important and applicable in the analyses of any data mined by the tracking services. These include clustering algorithms, which clusters together similarly occurring factor. A reference to a single cluster infers similar factors of occurrence. This makes the technology easy to use. However, the clustering if not effectively customized confuses thereby making understanding a lot difficult than the decision tree technology. The use of artificial neural networks in the analysis of data is important for obtaining knowledge from the data collected. Neural networks are based on the way that the biological nervous system works. Highly interconnected elements of information work together like the way neurons work in the nervous system in tandem to solve a problem. Artificial neural networks learn by example. This is attained by a learning process that recognizes a specific pattern or data recognition. Essentially, the neural network adapts to the present circumstances to the given data and discovers the natural relationships that may exist. The advantage of neural networks is that they allow for adaptive learning. Hence, it is possible for the neural networks to learn to do tasks on a given set of data after an initial training. Also, neural networks are able to create independent representation of information depending on the data that is received. This means that data is analyzed in real time and organic relationships are deduced (Jiaming, 2008). The application of neural networks would be useful for the analysis of data from Cardiff and Company websites. Essentially, the artificial neural networks would play a significant role in discovering the relationships among various customer browsing patterns. These relationships can show the individual preferences and thus help in conducting a targeted marketing campaign. Also, through the use of dedicated hardware, the neural networks can give real time information on the client patterns on the websites. This information can be used to modify the websites in order to meet the present customer requirements. Neural networks are capable of fault tolerance even with major network damage hence they are a reliable analysis mechanism since they enable redundant information coding. Association rules can be used to detect relationships between specific values of categorical variables in a given data set. The essence of association rules is to discover hidden patterns in large datasets. For instance, association rules can be used to discover hidden patterns such as what a customer is likely to buy depending on his purchase patterns. A typical example is the collection of information in a large clothes store. At the checkout, information such as the customer’s details and the actual purchases can be recorded. The customer’s records in the database will comprise of the unique identifier and the several clothes that the customer has purchased. The purpose of association rules is determine the association among the various products that the customer has purchased. This information can then be used to predict what other product the customer is likely to buy from the store. This information can then be used to make intelligent suggestions to the customer on other recommended products. Cardiff and Company can utilize the association rules to bundle products and service offerings to the potential clients who visit the websites. For instance, the association rules can be used to determine which tourist attraction sites may be preferred by a given customer based on the places that they have clicked. After analyzing this information, the site can provide useful feedback to the customer. For instance, the site can issue a message like “Other interesting places you may like to visit”. This information is given after analyzing the pattern of the client. Thus, the recommendations are highly targeted based on the relationship among the various parts that the user browsed (Wellman, 1988). Predictive modeling is used to best predict the probability of an outcome to occur based on a set of data. The essence of predictive modeling is to describe the possibility of a customer to take a certain course of action. This is critical especially in customer relationship management to analyze patterns of clients. The information obtained can be applied in sales and marketing activities with an aim of customer retention. For instance, predictive modeling can be used to analyze the probability of a customer maintaining a given subscription to a given data plan. Once the information is obtained, the sales and marketing department will take the appropriate actions. The main aim of Cardiff and Company is market Cardiff city as a premier destination. The composite websites of Cardiff and Company can be used to collect information and data on the present clients who use their services. Data collected can then be used to predict the likelihood of the clients to stay on. A typical example is the students who may have registered for educational services in Cardiff city. The available information on the students can be used to predict whether they will stay in the city for long. As an example, a student who visits various places in the city and is engaged in part time job is likely to stay in the city for longer. The information collected can be used to fine tune the marketing campaigns with a specific target of ensuring that clients are not lost (Tabush et al, 2011). Temporal difference algorithms are used in predictive modeling by using a reinforced learning perspective. This algorithm uses dynamic programming to predict the occurrence of future events to a high degree of certainty. Temporal algorithms are different from the traditional predictive models in that it takes into account subsequent predictions in its analysis. It should be noted that subsequent predictions are interrelated to a certain degree. Thus, the temporal algorithm improves upon the previous prediction in addition to any new information that may arise (Levesque, 2007). The application of temporal algorithms to Cardiff and Company’s analysis of website data can be of great importance. For instance, the shopping data collected from the websites can be used to predict with accuracy the future purchasing patterns of the clients. Temporal algorithms can be used to adjust the future predictions in a dynamic manner. The customer’s shopping information can be gathered and populated with time. Each time the customer purchases some goods, the information is incorporated to the previous records and new analysis done to predict future behavior based on the most current transactions. Thus, the predictions are more likely to be accurate as they are based on a combination of previous information and the most current data. Spatial data mining is important in analyzing information in a spatial database. This is relatively more complex compared to analyzing data from a relational database. The information stored in a spatial database has complex relationships that can be harnessed to give great business insights. In essence, spatial data mining has positive implications on storage management as well prevention of inconsistencies. Imperatively, this means that data integrity is safe guarded and the data query is more comprehensive. The index structures that are used in spatial data mining enable the database to be queried in varied ways thus enriching the information that can be obtained from the available datasets (Jiaming, 2008). Therefore, Cardiff and Company can benefit greatly from the use of spatial data mining techniques. The data collected from the various databases can be stored in spatial databases and then analyzed in an elaborate manner to discover hidden relationships. It should be noted that spatial correlations are critical in deducing of otherwise hidden relationships among the variables in a dataset. Essentially, a spatial database will give Cardiff and Company a solid platform for conducting a robust data analysis. The information obtained can be used to derive relationships among the entire range of the products and services that Cardiff and Company offers. With an elaborate description of the relationships, it will be possible for Cardiff and Company to cross sell its offerings to the clients that visit the websites. However, the final choice of technology to be used for analyzing the data mined depends on the business objectives of a given company. For instance, a business that simply needs to view the purchase patterns of its clients may only require simple analytic tools. However, a requirement to obtain complex relationships of consumer behavior from the data mined may need sophisticated technologies to unravel. It would be recommended that Cardiff and Company implements a hybrid of algorithms in order to reap maximum information from the data that is collected from the various websites. References Argyrous, G. (2001). Statistics for Research: With a Guide to SPSS. London: Sage. Bogomolova, S. (2011). Service quality perceptions of solely loyal customers. International Journal of Market Research, 53(6) 793-810. Iacobucci, D. (2012). MM2 (2nd ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning Jiaming, Y (2008). Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, Melbourne, Springer. Levesque, R. (2007). SPSS Programming and Data Management: A Guide for SPSS and SAS Users. Oxford: OUP. Barret, R. (2003). Vocational business training, developing and motivating peope. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tabbush, et al. (2011). MBA primer: Marketing management 3.0 instructor-led printed access card (3rd ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning. Wellman, B. (1988). Doing it ourselves. 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