Business Intelligence Research Project

I am pasting Instructor comments for this Assighnment here

In general, your APA formatting looked great.

Your introduction, including your problem statement and research question were excellent.

Your literature review was good, but I felt like it was a little short. I would have liked to see you talk about methods of assessment and analysis, or something related to that aspect of your research.

In general, your methodology was very good. I only have one small criticism and that is the inclusion of the sample data. The text in it was so small, that it really made it useless. Your model looked great.

Your findings were very on point and succeeded in answering your research question and solving your problem.

Your paper was one of the best ones I’ve ever received. Well done.

( 10 )

Abstract

Rapid advancements in technology reap many benefits; however, it causes the employees a lot of stress, sleeplessness, and frequently changing work shifts. In the present day, the human workforce feels they are replaceable by smart technologies, talent, and artificial intelligence, adding further stress to employees. Business Intelligence (BI) has made significant contributions to analyzing the health states and patient behavior. In this paper, BI identifies some of the root causes of performance declines, such as impossible deadlines and professional help access. The client, StarrTech, observed performance decline among its employees, gathered some data, and consulted our team for analysis. In this report, IntrAnalytics explores StarrTech's employee wellness dataset's various aspects and leverages business intelligence tools and approaches to provide valuable insights. This paper explores similar previous scholarly work. Technological organizations are taking employee health and overall wellness initiatives to provide a positive workspace and be successful. We strive to provide useful analysis, evaluations of problems, and tailored findings to StarrTech. IntrAnalytics delivers a cost-effective solution to StarrTech by using some of the best BI tools available in the market. IntrAnalytics provides some visual findings, both qualitative and quantitative, and it can be accessed easily by StarrTech executives.

Keywords: technology, employee mental wellness, business intelligence solutions

Table of Contents

Introduction 4 Problem Statement 4 Research Question 5 Literature Review 6 Methodology 8 Findings 13 Conclusion 17 References 19

According to Tableau, Business Intelligence (BI) is a wide array of operations performed to help organizations make data-driven decisions; it includes data acquiring, preprocessing, statistical and visual analysis, representation, reporting, and tools used to name a few. BI has created quite a buzz since the 1960s; it started as a form of information sharing across organizations to aid decision-making with valuable insights into the 1980s. In the present day, BI equips businesses by providing robust solutions on trusted infrastructures. In simple terms, BI enables a platform to gather, process, analyze, and store raw data to answer business problems ("What is Business Intelligence?", n.d.).

BI plays a significant role in healthcare, providing insights that help them strategize and function effectively. Few applications include patient behavior analysis, operational efficiencies, or inefficiencies of healthcare facilities. IntrAnalytics has worked with many clients to help analyze their data and develop meaningful insights. A recent instance is helping a healthcare facility with its operations strategy over the years. Research suggests that one in two are said to have mental health conditions; data sources from OSMI indicate that about 52% of technology professionals are diagnosed with mental conditions (Barkved, 2020).

StarrTech observed and identified a performance decline among its employees. Many factors contribute to poor performance among employees, such as unrealistic requirements, tight deadlines, long hours, 24x7 availability expectations, health concerns, inadequate training, lack

of venue to express opinions and concerns, and tools to perform job duties. Finally, no means to identify and analyze the root causes of performance degradation.

Based on the data available to IntrAnalytics, can Tableau provide a concise analysis of performance degradation causes among StarrTech's employees to its executives?

Every organization maintains a knowledge base which consists of various skills and technologies that they can work the projects on. Increasing the knowledge base is considered as important as it helps to gain a competitive advantage. The innovation of new technologies helps to increase the knowledge base. Many organizations are also conducting mental wellness programs to enhance mental stress to handle this pressure in the organization.

Organizational stress is defined as the pressure that impacts the employee's physical, emotional, and mental strain. In recent times, this is seen in many organizations as they are focused on the competitive advantage and tend to put unwanted pressure on the employees. Multiple factors constitute the stress on any employee (Alper & Wojtowicz, 2019).

Task-Related Issues

Depending on the requirement every position brings new requirements and new tasks.

Some of them will be in the employee comfort zone and expertise area and will be easy to perform. But some tasks will create a lot of stress as they will be out of the area of expertise and the employee will be asked to perform. This causes unwanted stress for the employee.

Physical Demands

Many positions require employees to indulge in physical activities and these might go beyond the employee can handle and these also can cause the physical stress on the person.

Organizational Demands

Every organization invests lots of budget and interest in knowledge innovations. This creates a lot of pressure on various teams and all the employees, as they must invest enough time in learning and increase the knowledge base.

Another risk factor is that physical conditions such as hypertension and diabetes can also be caused by stress, in addition to anxiety disorders being a product of stress (Chen, 2019).

While the two-way connection between stress and these physical disorders has been identified by studies, companies need to understand this and encourage workers to maintain a good work-life balance. This alone can be a challenging task to enforce such deadlines, to provide a market edge, to maintain progress, and to have a personal need to.

Accordingly, emotional wellness issues frequently go unrecognized and untreated — harming a person's wellbeing and vocation, yet besides, diminishing efficiency at work.

Satisfactory treatment, then again, can reduce manifestations for the representative and improve work execution. Yet, achieving these points requires a move in perspectives about the idea of mental issues and the acknowledgment that such a beneficial accomplishment takes exertion and time.

Data Source

The raw data was obtained using StarrTech's application gateway and Java Database Connection and loaded into IntrAnalytics' temporary data store. While the data was being extracted, simple data transformation techniques were applied to make it compatible with the local data store. It included removing irrelevant columns and converting data types required for analysis. Data were assessed and evaluated for redundancies and inconsistencies, performed integrity checks, and indexing. Microsoft Excel was used to store, access, and query the data, and Tableau was the OLAP tool to analyze and produce findings.

Data Attributes

The dataset covers a wide array of information on the employees' overall health in the tech industry, common causes for stress, their impact on their work, and whether they sought professional help. Information also includes the organization benefits, wellness programs, remote work options, ease of taking mental wellness time-off, employee's family history of mental conditions. Some of the data points that were fundamental to this research analysis include:

· family_history: to identify if an employee's family has a history of mental condition

· treatment: has the employee sought professional help?

· work_interfere: does the employee believe mental condition interferes with work?

· remote_work: does the employee work remotely?

· wellness_program: does the employer provide wellness programs?

· seek_help: does the employer offer the platform to seek professional help?

· leave: ease of taking wellness time off?

· mental health consequence: Does employee talking about mental wellness have negative consequences?

· supervisor: does the employee feel confident discussing mental health conditions with the supervisor?

· mental vs physical: does the employee think the employer treats psychological and physical wellness equally?

· comments: Any additional notes or comments

Figure 1

Sample Data

Note: This is a screenshot of the dataset as seen from MS Excel

Data Preprocessing

The selected dataset was relatively small and compact; however, it required some amount of preprocessing. The steps included assessing and evaluating the chosen data's quality, filling in

any missing rows and columns, correcting inconsistent values, and removing duplicate entries. The information was consolidated to be more suited for this research project.

Tools

After careful consideration, Tableau and MS Excel are the selected tools to perform data cleaning, analysis, and data visualization. Online analytical processing (OLAP) functions were performed using MS Excel OLAP extension. OLAP operations that are implemented include: 1) data assessment and evaluation, 2) relevant data consolidation, 3) data explorations to gain a deeper understanding, 4) data segmentation for analysis, 5) add missing data points, and 6) inconsistent and duplicate data correction (Pandey, 2019). Tableau is mainly used for data visualization and representation of results.

Several tools, such as Apache Kylin and IBM Cognos Software, were evaluated before narrowing down our options. Reasons for choosing Tableau and MS Excel as tools for analyzing and visualization are mainly the ease of access and the tools' intuitive nature. IBM Cognos is web-based and commonly used for complex analysis. Apache Kylin is best suited for large datasets. The dataset used for this research project is relatively small and did not require complicated tools for OLAP functions. Given the nature of our dataset, MS excel provided a great platform to consolidate, explore data, and it has multiuser access. Tableau also proved to be a great intuitive tool to access, setup, and use for our visualizations; the company offers a free downloadable version for students making it a top choice.

Model

Below is the sequence of steps our team IntrAnalytics implemented to solve the problem statement and address the research question, as stated above.

Figure 2

Process model

Note. This figure is a visual representation of the approach used in this research project

· Problem identification: the first step was to isolate and understand the question thoroughly to provide a concise analysis

· Retrieve data: obtain data from the source, assess, evaluate, clean, preprocess, and consolidate data to make it more suitable for use

· Research similar work: perform a literature survey of previous similar work done in this field

· Review and select tools: identify the options available in the market, evaluate the pros and cons, and choose the most suited tools

· Analyze and visualize data using selected tools and methods

· Develop qualitative and quantitative findings, and finally document and present the results

The dataset provided by StarrTech is a survey of all employees working in the company and their work conditions. To assess the reasons for performance degradation at StarrTech, we first performed a preliminary analysis of the dataset provided to us.

The first feature that was inspected closely were the factors at work that induced stress within the employees. As can be seen in Figure 3, tight deadlines are a major stress inducer, closely followed by over-supervision, job insecurity and lack of proper resources. Apart from these, various other employees indicated other factors such as work being monotonous or long hours that contributed to employee dissatisfaction.

Figure 3

Factors That Cause Stress at Work

Note. Categories of work stress factors for given number of employees.

Once we determined the causes for work stress which impacted the employee performance, we later on focused if mental health was actually a contributing factor in preventing the employees from working productively. In the figure below, the column chart tells us the size of mental health interfering with the work performance. We observed that there are a significant amount of employees that feel they cannot work productively due to their mental health while there are a medium portion of employees, which are still important to be considered for analysis. Even a smaller portion of employees that feel they can’t contribute fully to their work would be a cause of concern since it impacts the or

Figure 4

( Work Interference 465 264 213 173 144 NA Never Often Rarely Sometimes ) ( Number of Employees )Work Interference

Note. Column chart of interference in carrying out work activities due to mental health.

The next analysis that we performed was the number of employees whose family had a history of mental health issues within them and if the employees received treatment for it. The

visualization generated for this analysis is a stacked column chart that represents the number of employees that have received the treatment or not received any treatment while the legend tells us which of this had a family history of mental health issues and which of them didn’t. Figure 5 tells us that 50% of the people who received treatment had a family history of mental health issues while 35% of employees who had a family history of mental health issues didn’t receive any treatment.

Figure 5

Treatment sought for employees with a family history of mental healthy issues

Note. Stacked column chart chart of employees with family history of mental health issues and if they sought treatment.

Lastly, we wanted to find out that since there are factors in the workplace that are inducing stress within the employees, we needed to know if the company ever had a discusion about mental health with the employees and made them aware about the employee wellness program present in the company. Our analysis generates an infographic that tells us about the employee awareness of the wellness program. It reveals that 51% of the employees didn’t receive any resources on how to seek help for mental health issues. There’s a mere 20% of the employees within the company that know about this program if they needed to seek help while 29% of the people weren’t even aware of any such discussions or resources within StarrTech.

Figure 6

Mental Health Discussion by Employer

Note. Diagram of mental health discussion given to the employee by the employer as a part of company’s employee wellness program.

In conclusion, working in the tech industry is often demanding and cumbersome. Mental health in the tech industry has not received attention in the past. The critical nature of the tech industry can make the employees get consumed by meetings, deadlines, support and developing new products to the extent that they neglect other aspects of their lives, such as family and friends (Murphy & Akullian, 2018). External pressure stems from the fact that shareholders, customers, friends and family expect you to perform optimally at work. Internal pressure arises from your expectations. Most tech professionals want their projects to be the most outstanding and feel as if they are not working hard enough and continuously push themselves to the limit. The idea of perfection consumes them, and they cannot think about anything else. Once that project gets done, the cycle continues, which is a recipe for burnout.

In most cases, whenever a victim comes out, they receive a response that is not entirely encouraging. Comments such as “Do not worry, I am sure it is all in your mind” or “You are lucky to be a tech professional, stop stressing over minor issues” discourage victims from expressing themselves. Mental illness is something that does not happen overnight. Drastic behavioral change towards the victim may make him feel alienated. The tech industry is very performance-oriented, and the case is more difficult for minorities, such as women and for people of color. Symptoms of depression include loss of interest in everyday activities, general sadness and constant fatigue.

Tech companies need to acknowledge the importance of mental health and must find ways to support tech professionals. Mental health is as important as physical health. Openly talking about the issue is an excellent way of getting employees to open and get assistance. Managers and other employees should not discriminate against those who confess to having

mental health issues. It is also essential to provide clear priority guidance in the workplace. Urgent and tasking projects should be followed by less straining projects to relieve tech professionals from excessive pressure (Rao & Chandraiah, 2012).

Another way that companies can help deal with mental health issues in the tech industry is by discouraging employees' 24/7 connectivity. Tech professionals should always not be required to be available over phone or emails. Employees should be prevented from discussing work matters during non-working hours to focus on other things besides work projects. The lack of work-life balance can lead to adverse mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

Cases of suicides due to extreme pressures in the tech industry are also prevalent. The management is significantly responsible for dealing with the challenge of mental health issues in the tech industry.

It is the responsibility of everyone to protect the marginalized in the tech industry.

Policies should get set against workplace bullying and harassment, which can lead to depression and cause or worsen existing mental health issues. The minorities should quit the mentality of over-performing for them to get noticed in the tech industry. Mentality creates more problems in the long run. Besides, tech professionals don't need to relocate to Silicon Valley to experience career growth. Tech professionals should not place such unnecessary pressures on themselves.

They should feel free to take sick days if they think they are experiencing burnout and avoid working during those days by switching off their work lines and communication. Mental health is essential and should be treated as such.