Leadership in Analytics
S.W.O.T Analysis
“SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and so a SWOT Analysis is a technique for assessing these four aspects of your business.” In my perspective, S.W.O.T, the summarized analysis report, is kind like a note paper to help you assess the company, a team, or yourself.
For example, when you are job hunting, the most difficult question probably is “What are your weaknesses?”. I think the best answer is not only to list your weaknesses but also providing solutions. And you should always face your weaknesses and try to solve them. The SWOT will remind you of the status and you should always try to improve it.
Case Study
Tesla, Inc. is the most famous electric car maker in the world. Tesla has even become synonymous with electric cars.
According to the share price of the biggest four automobiles manufacture on February 24, 2020, the rest three famous companies have a total market value of 96.44 billion dollars. However, Tesla, Inc. has a market value of 153.41 billion dollars. It is not because Tesla has more market share than them or Tesla has higher profit rates to give back to the stockholders. It is because people trust that one day the electric cars will completely replace the fuel cars, and the self-driving cars will eliminate traditional non-smart cars. People trust Tesla will become the next Apple, Inc. and finish this mission - shape the future vehicle industry. And we can see that the trust is not always strong since the lowest share price is only 176.99 in 52 weeks. And the highest share price is 968.99 - 5.47 times difference in one year.
Strength What do you do well? What Unique resources can you draw on? What do others see as your strengths? |
Weaknesses What could you improve? Where do you have fewer resources than others? What are others likely to see as weaknesses? |
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1. Tesla has the world’s best patents and techniques for electric cars and self-driving cars. 2. Tesla has a subsidiary named SolarCity, which is the biggest solar technique company in the U.S. Customers who install solar panels from SolarCity will never pay for the electricity. 3. Elon Musk is a genius and a great leader. |
1. Tesla has insufficient capacity, and this situation is hard to change in a short time. 2. The battery is one of the most costly components of an electric car, but Tesla is too dependent on the third party battery factory. 3. Customers worry about the charging time and the longest-range of electric cars. |
Opportunities What opportunities are open to you? What trends could you take advantage of? How can you turn your strengths into opportunities? |
Threats What threats could harm you? What is your competition doing? What threats do your weaknesses expose to you? |
1. The vehicle industry will finally transfer from fuel to electricity because of the lack of non-renewable energy. 2. Every country acknowledges to the point one and offers preferential policies to electric car makers. 3. Tesla’s self-driving technology will help Tesla increase sales |
1. Coronavirus shut down the factory. 2. Almost all automobile manufactures start to release electric cars. 3. Product Defects and high exposure. |
Related Reading Materials
Towards a life cycle oriented business intelligence success model
The roles of BI capabilities and decision environments
Chapter 4 of Agile Analytics (Collier, 2011) provides an interesting and novel view sight in the first two phases of CRISP-DM.
In my opinion, Business Understand and Data Understanding are the crucial parts of the whole CRISP-DM process.
Assume we are running an investment company, our target is higher profits. Therefore, we need to attract more customers and improve the efficiency of investments. We should classify different scenarios for different users. And users are not the simple definition of the customers. Users may be the customers, the staffs from different departments, even the developers themselves. A scenario is a series of possible events that the user may do. Therefore, as the system designer, we should consider from the point of view of the users. Here is a sample from customers:
As a customer, I need the ability to review my investments in an easy way so that I will not worry about my money.
To achieve this requirement, a simple method is to how much the customer has earned compared to the initial investment. We could show a chart with the initial money in a blue shape and present the earned money in a green shape. Green means the rise of the share price. So the customer may feel happy. Then we could provide more details about his or her investment. But do not complicate things. For example, some bar charts, pie charts, and line charts are enough.