Business Intelligence
Cardiff has experienced major transformations over recent years, emerging as an exciting, vibrant and attractive European capital city. The city has clear ambitions to sustain this momentum and to propel itself forward as a premier league European capital over the next two decades.
Cardiff & Co has been created to help Cardiff realise this vision, by bringing together local stakeholders and the private sector into a single collaborative agenda to market and promote the city to a national and international audience. The company represents a new approach for the city, a new model of service delivery, based on strong partnership working and funded through a variety of public and private sector sources and commercially generated income.
The company aims to help Cardiff become a top 5 UK shopping destination and a top 10 UK short break destination. It aims to help the city improve its position in the top 10 of UK conference cities, grow its reputation as a top 10 UK university city, and importantly, re-position the city and Wales as a high quality and competitive inward investment location.
Cardiff & Co’s broad vision is to promote and market Cardiff as an international capital city, to enhance the quality of investment, life-style, Employment, events, academia and tourism for the city and its region.
Within this context Cardiff & Co’s has four key areas of activity outlined below:
Image and Branding
The Cardiff brand projects a powerful image of the city and is fundamental to a range of initiatives, PR and Media activity aimed at delivering a step-change in Cardiff’s international profile and image. Widespread local adoption of the brand is crucial to the company’s long-term success and in fostering a greater sense of collaborative purpose in the city.
Working in Partnership
Promoting local engagement, partnership working and collaboration for mutually beneficial ends is a core facet of Cardiff & Co and a key area of company activity. A dedicated focus on attracting investment for the company, managing relationships with stakeholders and partners and generating income is being implemented with the primary aim of creating a virtuous cycle of increased investment leading to increased marketing and promotional activity.
Inward Investment
Attracting inward investment to Cardiff is a priority area of activity for Cardiff & Co. Success in marketing Cardiff as a competitive business location will deliver tangible results for the city’s private sector, particularly the property sector and the universities and will demonstrate clear benefits of participation. Cardiff’s proposition as a business location is supported by strong cultural and quality of life advantages that are unavailable to most other capital cities.
Tourism
Cardiff & Co delivers a range of activities to market the Cardiff tourism ‘experience’ and enhance the city’s business tourism and leisure tourism performance.
Assignments Requirements
Cardiff and Co have 9 main websites (and a handful more on top in other languages), representing different areas of the work they do: Visit, Meet, Invest, Shops, Events Study, Live, Work and Why (the corporate site). They are looking at rationalising these down to a more manageable number. Currently they use Google Analytics to assist with their analysis.
The Visit Cardiff site has evolved over the last 6 years or so, but has only ever had partial navigational redesigns. In the near future they will be changing their websites, merging some and dropping others. It would be very useful for them to get information on visitor behaviours, so that they know which ones to group together, and which they could get rid of.
In particular they are interested in examining the traffic flow on their sites and user behaviours, in the following ways:
(1.) They know how many visits each site gets so they can see which sites are used more that way, but what they cannot easily see (with Google Analytics) is how people move between the sites.For example, they would like to know if people land on Visit or Events (the highest visitor number sites) but then move from there to Live or Invest. Or would someone looking at Meet then move through to Events?
(2.) An important model of behavior is (a.) Inspiration ?(b.) Planning ?(c.) Booking ?(d.) Advocacy, i.e. people are inspired to visit somewhere (a.), then they plan their trip (b.), then they book it (c.), and finally they (hopefully) write good reviews of their experience. The Cardiff & Co suite of websites support these stages to a certain degree, however they are looking at best practice for the new structure and information that can assist with their decisions and site redesign.
Tasks
PART 1
Produce a report containing the following:
• Review of the Cardiff & Cowebsites and their purposes
• Discussion of the use of Google Analytics facilities and their applicability to Cardiff & Co business aims
• Review of the available analytic tools for web data mining, for instance technologies listed on http://www.kdnuggets.com/software/web-mining.html
You may find the following useful when conducting your research:
• International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining (IJBIDM)
o http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=143&year=2011&vol=6&issue=1
• Business Intelligence Journal
o http://www.businessintel.org/
• International Journal of Business Intelligence Research (IJBIR)
o http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-business-intelligence-research/1168
• Gartner Business Intelligence Summit
o 6 – 7 February 2012 | London, UK
o http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/emea/business-intelligence/
• Annual International Academic Conference on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing (BIDW)
o http://www.bizintelligenceconf.org/
• Microsoft Business Intelligence
o http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/bi/default?ocid=src-n-gb-Non-loc-F4-&WT.srch=1
• IBM Business Intelligence
o http://www-05.ibm.com/innovation/uk/leadership/insights/index.html?csr=emuk_itcalemm-20111114&cm=k&cr=google&ct=100KY14A&S_TACT=100KY14A&ck=business_intelligence&cmp=100KY&mkwid=sOAIWyI6q_18132826314_4328nk2971
