BUS171: Individual Assignment 10

From Marta Dalton's presentation, I learned the basics of digital marketing. There is business to consumer marketing, but also business-to-business marketing. Business to consumer marketing is more complex than business-to-business marketing. When marketing to a consumer, the company must segment and understand the different demographics of a wide variety of people. In business-to-business marketing, the company must segment based on the characteristics of the business, which is much more narrow and focused. I think the presentation was very informational and it refined my understanding of what I learned in a previous marketing course I took last year.

I could not make Karl Herleman's presentation at MSA, but I did learn that MSA operates as a business-to-business organization. MSA uses information systems to aid business in decision-making in order for their businesses to be successful. Having a business like MSA is beneficial because those at MSA can enhance wide variety industries with their creation of new information systems or some that already exist. 

From Ginger Polozoff's presentation, I learned that project management can be used for personal and business operations. The project's objective and outcome has to be clear, measurable, verifiable, and traceable. When the project is complete, there must be a deliverable such as a website, recording, manual, and more! Project management requires a great deal of planning. The plan must be executed by producing deliverables as stated above, managing the different roles each person has in the project, and providing qualitative feedback. I liked the presentation because it was very interactive; she included jokes, quizzes, pictures, and a worksheet to follow along with the information on the slides. 

Information Systems and Operations has pushed me to exercise my skills in Microsoft Excel, learn the how to work Microsoft Access, and was exposed to different programs that could be used to manipulate and graph data such as Tableau. I am interested in learning how to code. I feel that learning how to code will make me more marketable to potential employers. I plan to work on my Excel and Access skills at my work-study (Career Development Office). I use Excel on a daily basis, and some functions that I have learned in class has helped me become more efficient with my projects. When I took the pre-course survey, I put ones on a lot of the topics listed; ones meaning no knowledge of. The post-course survey I took after the course ended did not include any ones, which means that I have basic knowledge of all topics and concepts presented in the course. 

BUS171: Individual Assignment 9

The most important things that I learned was how to created a code for the "IF" function and creating a Pivot Table and Pivot Chart. The "IF" function can be very useful when an organization needs classify combined pieces of data. The Pivot Table and Pivot Chart was helpful to know because it can graphically represent data represented in the Excel tables. The tables can do all the calculations of the data by a click of a button.

By looking at the data from Tableau, I learned the three primary activities in the business intelligence process. The first step is to acquire data, but the data we used was an Excel file of NFL Offensive Player Stats from 1999-2013 provided by Tableau. The second step is to analyze the data. We analyzed the data by using different Excel functions, the "IF" function was one of the many we completed. The final step is to publish results. For this assignment, we published our results by inputting the data into a Pivot Chart and Pivot Table.

An advanced Excel skill that we did not use in this assignment was "HLookup". HLookup is similar to VLookup, but the difference is that "VLookup" finds data placed vertically, while HLookup finds data placed horizontally. A user can lookup data in a specific column and duplicate it somewhere else in the Excel table. The example on Atomic Learning showed a case where a student's test score, homework, and project score needed to be copied onto another chart. Teachers can use this function to pull up a student's score on assignments if the student's parent called and wanted to know what their grades were in the class.

Map

BUS171: Individual Assignment 8

In this assignment, I organized an excel table with data on brand recognition of pittsburgh breweries. After organizing the data, I found the aggregate data for each persons rate on brand relevancy, familiarity, and regard of each brewery. I saved the excel file and uploaded it to Tableau Public. Tableau allowed me to see the data graphically and show the individual and aggregate data as a story.

The graph can be seen here: Brand Equity Data