Topic Notes for the Project (with thanks to students who have asked questions and tutors who have responded) Thinking about research Research-led education and teaching is recognised throughout the university. There is a lot of student assistance such as http://learnonline.canberra.edu.au/course/view.php?id=2101 . The purpose of the research component is to write about the project, citing the sources you have read to build your knowledge. It depends on your topic as to what you write about. It may be in-depth about health informatics or heart health matters. It may some novel approach to building a prototype for health analytics. It may be an ensemble of all the new knowledge you have acquired. It may be a critical reflection on your learning journey. All the same, this is academic writing requiring critical thinking, to be written in essay-style not as a report. I have not been specific in stating the exact topic for the research component because each project has been conducted differently. As you have stepped through the stages of proposal, presentation and prototype, you have been expected to research various pertinent matters ranging from heart health, obesity, smoking, health informatics, health business analytics, developing prototypes and so on. I do not mind which topic so long as the research component is relevant to the project and written in a scholarly manner. To research a topic in BIS and DSS, good starting points are the prescribed and recommended texts by Sharda et al. (2014) which have reference lists at the end of each chapter. There are also useful industry websites dssresources.com http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com/ and Australian Information Industry Association http://www.aiia.com.au/. They provide examples of software tools and research fields where computer-based BIS and DSS are being developed. As well, it’s worth looking at Business Intelligence journals https://tdwi.org/research/list/tdwi-business-intelligence-journal.aspx and http://www.businessintel.org/ both of which have a practitioner or industry-focus. For this heart health topic, there are up-to-date industry sources such the Heart Foundation at http://heartfoundation.org.au/your-heart/know-your-risks/blood-pressure and Stroke Foundation at https://strokefoundation.com.au/about-stroke/preventing-stroke/stroke-risk-factors/high-blood-pressure-and-stroke and many others which offer fact sheets. Wikipedia and Google are useful initially to get ideas, and Google Scholar is recommended to search for scholarly articles from academic journals. These journals include Decision Support Systems, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems and Australasian Journal of Information Systems. There are also many high-ranking information systems conferences. For referencing and other research skills, please refer to http://www.canberra.edu.au/library/research-gateway/research_help Thinking about the prototype Comments from Tim Barlow - Tim Barlow is a senior consultant at SAS. He had this to say about the goals of the project and how to visualise the data. Tim gave a lecture in week 10 about stats for business analytics. 1) Project objectives. Saving time is not an appropriate objective. Business Intelligence is more about decision automation, not efficiency gains. Specifically, there must be a ‘how’ in the objective that indicates which parts of the decision making process will be automated. 2) Project Intelligence. Intelligence in the context of this assignment is about understanding the patient’s condition and risks if nothing further is done, and providing an appropriate intervention strategy. It’s about knowing what’s going to happen before it does. This is more than reporting and charts; it’s about converting data to information. 3) Visualisation. The user must be provided with information rather than pure data readouts, even though these would be in a highly visual form that could be assimilated more completely than pure tabular data. See lecture notes in week 9. Charting needs to demonstrate a clear indication of the decision that should be made. Any chart that shows 85% risk (for example) looks quite self-evident; but what about charts that show 30% risk? Does it mean remedial action can be de-prioritised? What are the cutoffs? 4) Development Process Describing the development process involves analysing your approach to building your prototype, provides an audit trail and guides the reader in the steps you took. Some things to write about eg if you used Access, why did you decided to use Access and not Excel, what research did you undertake, how did you create the tables, what data did you use, why did you design the queries as you did, what visualisation tool did you use and how, what problems are being supported by this project, who are the users, and so on. All this information is worthy of being documented.   Thinking about the Proposal You are provided with raw data in both csv and sas format. However you need to create the context, problem, setting, uses and users of the data. We are not prescriptive in this regard. We would like you to use your imagination. You don't need to source the data. The data is provided although you may wish to 'clean' it. Examine the data. What does it tell you ? It looks like data from a study. The data is de-identified, no location and no date. We can assume it's open data for public viewing. Why would researchers want that data ? What would they do with it ? ‘Play’ with the data. Would you like to aggregate the data ? The data has a story to tell. If there are terms such as MRW you do not know, research those terms. After all, being resourceful is an expectation of UC graduates. And remember that you need to write a research piece in stage 3 of the project. This may be a topic worth investigating. If you are not strong with statistics, there are other ways to analyse the data. Building tables and querying the data is another way. Think about uses of the data. Would analysis of the data assist the government to make health policy regarding population problems from smoking, obesity, diet, etc ? Will the information from the data help support community health programs to combat early mortality from heavy smoking ? Would it be useful to the marketing department of a major cigarette company ? Would insurance companies like to have the data ? Would there be a reason for a GP to benefit from the information from the data ? Ask some BI questions. What does this data tell you about smoking ? What does this data tell you about smoking and weight ? This is only a start. Is there a correlation between early mortality and obesity ? Will the information be useful for prediction purposes ? So, who could be users of the information produced by data analysis ? Research the health industry generally, the information systems that they use. For example, Health Victoria and ACT Health may already have similar systems in place. Focus on one organisation or industry or individual rather than be too general. Focus on one user if you can. Give some thought to what is a DSS and what is a BIS. If you choose to create a DSS prototype, what data will you analyse ? If a BIS, would you need to integrate the data. Think about the lectures in weeks 2 and 3. How will you analyse the data ? Think Excel and Access. There are many other software tools and applications and soon you'll be using SAS products in classes. The data is given in sas format as well as csv. Remember this is a prototype. There is no requirement to use all the data, that is, there is no need to use every row and every column of the data for your prototype, just what applies to your prototype. You may wish to add data for your prototype to make more sense. That is up to you. How will you present the data ? What did you learn in DHCI ? Think design using wireframes, storyboards, templates, prototype click-throughs. What about Excel for charts, tables, dashboards. What about Access screen mockups ? What else ?