Virtual administration:

• Welcome!
• Class will begin at 9:00 a.m. PST
MGMT 580 • We look forward to connecting
BUSINESS with you shortly.
APPLIED RESEARCH
AND BUSINESS • Note: session will be recorded
ANALYTICS

Unit 1
WE WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN BY
ACKNOWLEDGING THAT WE GATHERED
ARE ON THE ANCESTRAL LANDS OF THE
XWSEPSUM (ESQUIMALT) AND
LKWUNGEN (SONGHEES) WHO SHARED
TRADITIONAL LAND RESOURCES WITH
NEIGHBORING FAMILIES OF SCIA’NEW
(BEECHER BAY), T’SOU-KE (SOOKE)
NATIONS, AND MANY OTHERS.
Deb and Poornima
 Check in

You. Are. Here.

AGENDA

• Check in and the news

• Course overview
• Assignments
• Collaborate sessions/Forum exercises
• Introduction to Evidence based management
• Practice with world problems
Course overview

• Moodle
• Course Schedule
• Readings & Resources
• Class Lectures &
Resources
• Writing Services
Assignment
overview Final Assignment
(individual) 35%:
Mock Proposal guided
by a research question
Jan 7
Assignment 1
(individual) 20%:
Management Contribution and
Decision case collaboration 20%
Nov 5 Assignment 2
(team) 25%:
Modelling
Nov 26
WB Activity

Current events, what’s going around the world?

(either comment below, put up your digital hand, or respond in the chat)
Whiteboard your comments:
UNIT 1
COURSE INTRODUCTION
MANAGEMENT DECISION
MAKING AND EVIDENCE-
BASED MANAGEMENT
 Need for Numbers in Business

• Thomas Davenport in his book titled, “Competing on analytics: The new science of
winning”-high-performance companies have high analytical skills among their
personnel.
• A survey of nearly 3000 executives, MIT Sloan Management Review reported that
there is striking correlation between an organization's analytics sophistication and
its competitive performance. The biggest obstacle to adopting analytics is the lack
of knowhow about using it to improve business performance.
• Business Analytics uses statistical, operations research and management tools to
drive business performance.
• For example: Business Analytics helps companies to find the most profitable
customer and allows them to justify their marketing effort, especially when the
competition is very high.

11/11/2020 Wasdani
 Why Decision Making?
• Business Intelligence
• Investment
• Resource Allocation
• Changing Scenarios-Pandemic
• Bad Decisions???

11/11/2020 Wasdani 11
 What are reasons for bad decision-making?
(either comment in white board below, put up your digital hand, or respond in the chat)
Programmed decision and Non-
Programmed Decisions
• Programmed decision
– Recurring problem
• Non-Programmed Decisions
– Unique
– Unstructured Decision
– Poorly defined
– Important Consequences

11/11/2020 Wasdani 13
Classical Decision-Making Model
• Rational Decision Making
– Problem is well defined
– Alternatives are evaluated by the Decision Makers based on information
– Criteria for evaluation is defined and the best alternate is elected
– All assumptions are known
– Ideal Decision are made
• Herbert Simon (1950)-Bounded Rationality and Satisficing rather
than maximizing decisions
• Max Weber (1966)- Bureaucracy Model (non-organisation
resources)
– Personalised bargaining process, driven by the agendas of participants
rather than rational processes.

11/11/2020 Wasdani 14
Other models of Decision Making
• Organisational/Program Model (March, 1988)
– Standard operating procedures invoked by organisational subunits
– Pre-programmed in existing procedures as well as the routinised
thinking of the people involved.
– Maintaining the status quo at the cost of innovation
• Garbage can model (Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972)
– Ambiguity exists in problems, preferences and people
– There exist many solutions for a problem. Choices are based on
preferences
– Limited rationality creates solutions
– Selections are less based on causal connection instead are driven by
attention allocation

11/11/2020 Wasdani 15
 Business Analytics
• Descriptive Analytics- What Happened
• Predictive Analytics- What might Happen
• Prescriptive Analytics-What can we do
Decision-Making
• Data to Decision (D2D):
– Data to information (D2I) and Information to
Decision (I2D)
– Quantitative Methods to Best Course Action
(Context Specific)

11/11/2020 Wasdani 16
 Newer forms of Data collection
• Satellite photos and drones provide other useful information.
– In rural areas, we can see crops in the ground, allowing us to estimate harvest size — even before
the actual harvest.
– This data gives us a direct window into an essential part of the economic lives of many of the world’s
rural poor.
– The information can be used to build early warning systems for crop failure, to create crop
insurance or target other forms of assistance.
• Another set of researchers used visual algorithms (related to those that
recognize your face on Facebook) to analyse these images pixel by pixel.
Through this process, they could quantify poverty in each square kilometre of
Uganda.
• The economist Joshua Blumenstock at the University of Washington uses
cellphone metadata (who calls whom, when and for how long) to measure
wealth.
– For instance, people who make calls at certain times of the day are wealthier, and people
who make lots of short calls tend to be poorer than people who make fewer, longer ones.
In a paper in Science, using data from Rwanda, he quantifies poverty at very high levels of
resolution, focusing not just on individual villages but on individual people
• Costs go down and accuracy goes up
Wasdani 17
Newer forms of data: Need or a Choice
• These challenges make new kinds of data — information that can be gathered
indirectly using algorithms and novel sources — particularly valuable. In
other words measuring without asking people directly — can be enormously
helpful.
• Case let:
– In 2015 North Korea released a budgetary report claiming its economy had grown by
roughly 225 percent. To verify this dubious economic miracle, night time satellite
images were captured by NASA.
– One image shows an ocean of lights in South Korea and China. It also shows a vast
darkness between them, depicting the grim reality of North Korea, where night lighting
is a rare luxury. If North Korea is experiencing an economic miracle, it is a purely
daytime affair.
– Satellite photos provide a level of geographic specificity that national accounts do not.

Wasdani 18
 Understanding the World: Better Ways
Evidence Relevant to Decision-Making

What is a Right Decision?

Who should benefit?
How should the beneficiaries be targeted?
• Our world has more data available now than ever before. Datasets are collections of
information about a set of people or objects.
• Statistics are measures that capture aggregate information across a dataset and
help us to describe the world.
• The data commonly used to answer these questions came almost exclusively from
countrywide surveys, which are expensive and logistically challenging.
• For example: It is very difficult, unreliable and costly to randomly sample people in
the rural areas of Bihar in India.
• Morten Jerven, an economist at Simon Fraser University, argues in his book, “Poor
Numbers,” that for many African countries the lack of quality data impedes
development.

Wasdani 19
Evidence-based management
WB Activity
Does experience count as evidence-based management?

Yes No
Captain Sully
 Evidence Based Management

11/11/2020 Wasdani 23
 Sources of Evidence
• Scientific evidence: Findings from published
scientific research
• Organizational evidence: Data, facts and
figures gathered from the organization
• Experiential evidence: The professional
experience and judgment of practitioners
• Stakeholder evidence: The values and
concerns of people who may be affected by
the decision
11/11/2020 Wasdani 24
Evidence Based Management-6 As
• Asking: translating a practical issue or problem into an
answerable question
• Acquiring: systematically searching for and retrieving the
evidence
• Appraising: critically judging the trustworthiness and
relevance of the evidence
• Aggregating: weighing and pulling together the evidence
• Applying: incorporating the evidence into the decision-
making process
• Assessing: evaluating the outcome of the decision taken to
increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome

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10 minute break
 Dealing with the “mess” and
evidence-based management
Based on these three quick news stories:
1) Kraft Heinz opens ghost kitchen
2 Westjet to issue refunds for flights cancelled due to
Covid-19
3) Will Canada create a guaranteed basic income

• How do you suppose decisions were made (evidence-based

approach?); What is the consequence of these decisions?

• What are the variables in the case?

• How might you define the problem?

• How might you define a research approach?

Identify one person to speak on behalf of the team

during the class debrief.
 Dealing with the “mess” and
evidence-based management

Identify one person to speak on behalf of the team

during the class debrief.

• How do you suppose decisions were made

(evidence-based approach?); What is the
consequence of these decisions?

• What are the variables in the case?

• How might you define the problem?

• How might you define a research approach?
Kraft Heinz gets into the food delivery
business with its own ‘ghost kitchen’

• https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/
article-kraft-heinz-gets-into-the-food-deliver
y-business-with-its-own-ghost
WESTJET TO ISSUE REFUNDS FOR
FLIGHTS CANCELLED DUE TO
COVID-19

• https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/
article-westjet-to-issue-refunds-for-flights-
cancelled-due-to-covid-19/
WILL CANADA EMERGE FROM
THE PANDEMIC WITH A
GUARANTEED BASIC INCOME?
• https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commen
tary/article-will-canada-emerge-from-the-pandemic-
with-a-guaranteed-basic-income/
 Why Do Research?

• Documentation, discovery and interpretation and

advancement of knowledge.
• Purpose of Research
– Review or synthesize existing knowledge
– Investigate existing situations or problems
– Provide solutions to problems
– Explore and analyse general issues
– Construct or create new procedures or systems
– Explain new phenomena
– Collis
Source: Generate new knowledge
& Hussey, 2003

11/11/2020 Wasdani 32
 Topic of Research

• Something that fascinates you

• An issue that you are passionate about
• Sufficient understanding of the area-Gather it
• Physically access to the locus of your research?
• Will there be political or administrative obstacles?
• Can you reach the people you need to interview, survey, or
observe?
• Do you have the language skills you need?
• If you’re using documents or data that already exist, can you
access the materials you need in archives, physically, or online?

11/11/2020 Wasdani 33
WB Activity

Why does…….
(either comment below or put up your digital hand and I will unmute your audio)
Whiteboard your comments:
 Closing thoughts

“ Without data, you are just another person

with an opinion” Deming
“You can’t be analytical without data, and you
can’t be really good at analytics without really
good data. TechRepublic.
Generate your own data through research!
QUESTIONS/DISCUSSION
Check in / Wrap-up/Next week
References