Question

2. What is the purpose of historical data and the role it plays in organizational decisions? a. Describe a situation from your personal experience or from a business journal website where historical data impacted decisions, whether it was for the best or worst.

Answer 1

The organization’s historical data are stored in a storehouse called data warehouse. The purpose of historical data is to provide leverage for the management in an organization. Effective decision making is the major function of any organization. The availability of historical data facilitates meaningful research that would facilitate effective management processes. With historical data in place, every department in the organization can share the data & though the cost of operations would be reduced, it allows the users to perform analysis across all the departments in the organization.

We can take the example of apple whose board of directors decided to bring back Steve jobs to the company that was founded 20 years back. Apple was in a rotten state of affairs during its 20^th year of existence. In 1996, apple lost around millions in its sales. As a result of this, apple decided to purchase a software company to gain the intellectual property & talent in order to replace apple’s aging operating system software.