Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
software and data needs. It requires a business analyst to take the business's requirements
and create a comprehensive document. The document must be detailed enough for
a business user to understand the business and technical criteria that the project will
succeed or fail under. During this first step, you will usually have a fuzzy notion of the
requirements. The architect must accept this as a limitation and devise methods to
further refine the requirements till a certain acceptable level of clarity is obtained.
A properly framed requirement consists of a description of the issue the business
wants to analyze, the issue's importance to the organization, collection of a set of reasons
supporting the issue's creation, and analysis of any constraints such as time, place, or
condition.
Consider two examples of a properly framed requirement: the loan repayment
delinquency problem and the product mix optimization problem.
The Loan Repayment Delinquency Problem:
The credits and loans processing
department of a bank requests that an analytics team investigate a delinquency problem
where increasingly a large base of their customers are turning delinquent. The business
sponsor wants the analytics team to help them find the answer to the question: “Why are
they seeing a disturbing trend of their customer base turning delinquent?”
After a detailed workshop with the business users, the analysts started developing
the business use case:
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Problem:
What is causing customers to turn delinquent?
•
Behavior:
Who are these customers? Are they long-time,
profitable customers suddenly turning delinquent? Or are they
newly acquired customers?
•
Complications:
What conditions constitute delinquency?
Missing payment dates consecutively for last 3 months, missing
payment dates for last 2 months but paying back the money with
interest fees over the subsequent months, not paying over the
previous 6 months and not reachable?
•
Impact to business:
Reducing profitability per customer, revenue
loss, and increased expenses chasing the delinquent customers.
•
Background:
The bank recently launched multi-channel
interactions with customers in order to acquire more customers.
While the customer base increased, and a large chunk of the
customers came through the online channels, there was a need
to expedite the loans and credit approval processes so that the
customer does not go away to other banks that had also launched
similar products and interaction channels.
•
Conditions:
The first few symptoms of missing payments happen
after the first 3 months of becoming a customer. There are also
observations across the older customer base of older customers
who are turning delinquent (although not frequently).
The delinquency problem meets the requirement for a big data problem due to
volume, complexity, and variety. The bank acquires millions of customers annually.
Business users believe the delinquency trend is not new and may be due to several
