INFS1602- Week 7

Part A- Unseen Cyberazzi

2. Using business intelligence on purchasing data for targeted marketing seems innocuous. Is it? Using both
the categorical imperative (pages 52–53) and utilitarian (pages 78–79) perspectives, assess the ethics of the
following:

a. Some people, whether from genetic factors, habit, lack of education, or other factors, are prone to
overeating junk food. By focusing junk food sales offers at this market segment, data brokers or their
customers are promoting obesity. Is their behaviour ethical?

In order to assess the ethics, first, we need to understand how Kant’s categorical imperative and utilitarianism
would respectively apply to the situation at hand. If such practices were to be accepted as a universal law and
organisations were to target vulnerable individuals with junk food offers, a clear increase in obesity would
follow and possibly have negative effects on the target group. This situation is obviously cannot be sustained
in the real world. Therefore, under Kant’s categorical imperative this act is perceived as an immoral and
unethical act.

However, from lens of utilitarianism that defined how the morality of an act is determined by its outcomes, the
act of the advertising of the junk food is a part of business marketing function which increases customers’
exposure to a business’s products thus potentially increasing sales and revenue which can give benefit and
profit to the company. In doing so, businesses would be better off hence stimulating the economy which in turn
increases overall economic activities and spending from customers. This outcomes which give benefits to
everyone holistically therefore making it an ethical behaviour in terms of utilitarianism.

b. Data brokers claim they can reliably infer ethnicity from consumer behaviour data. Suppose they
also determine that one ethnic group is more likely to attend college than others. Accordingly, they
focus the marketing for college-prep materials, scholarships, and university admissions applications
on this ethnic group. Over time, that group will be guided into positive (assuming you believe college
is positive) decisions that other groups will not. Is this behaviour different from ethnic profiling? Is it
ethical?

I would say from both perspectives, the data brokers behaviour is unethical. The data brokers should not be
focusing on one ethnic group to sell college prep material as it could be seen as discriminatory to only target
one specific group of people. Therefore, the act of discrimination done by the data broker should not be
considered ethical under the categorical imperative. On the other hand, if the data brokers are not targeting all
groups equally, then they are not maximizing the greatest outcome. A greater outcome would be gaining more
consumers by appealing to people diversely thus under utilitarianism theory this would be unethical as well.
Part B-Research success or failures in the use of BI software.

Find 1 recent article (2018 or later) or news that discuss success of any company using BI technologies AND
1 failure (risks, controversies (legal issues and the like) of any company using business intelligence.
[Expectation: 2 articles in total =>400 words in total for all 3 questions below]

Write summary notes your chosen articles. In your summary be sure to address critical points of the case:

1. What was the core objective of using BI? (i.e. describe the problem that needed to be solved and the
desired outcome)

2. What was the result or impact? Did they succeed or fail? (or both?)

3. Using Osterwalder Business Model canvas (see extra material), which component do you think was
impacted the most out of the use of BI

Article 1: https://seleritysas.com/blog/2019/04/05/how-netflix-used-big-data-and-analytics-to-generate-
billions/ (How Netflix used big data and analytics to generate billions)
Article 2: https://bibrainz.com/blog/2018/11/14/why-is-bi-failure-going-to-cost-159b-by-2020/ (Why is BI failure
going to cost $159B by 2020? )

In order to compete with other competitors such as Hulu and Amazon Prime, Netflix has to think a way that
can attract more customer to be loyal and retained with them. Therefore, Netflix makes various of successful
TV show and movies hits such as ‘House of Cards’, ‘Orange Is The New Black’, and ‘Birdbox’ which have
garnered a lot of attention and high viewership, driving up the rate of subscriptions of customer and this is
thanks to business intelligence BI). Using (BI), Netflix successfully able to gather information and identifying
what their audience wants.

Netflix uses data processing software and traditional business intelligence tools such as Hadoop and Teradata,
as well as its own open-source solutions such as Lipstick and Genie, to gather, store, and process massive
amounts of information. These platforms influence its decisions on what content to create and promote to
viewers. With advanced technology of business intelligence such as using Amazon’s S3 to warehouse its data,
it shows that Netflix is very particular about having a lot of data and being able to process this data to ensure
it understands exactly what its users want. From the data of 151 million subscribers of Netflix, they
implementing data analytics model to discover customer behavior and buying pattern and from that
information, the producers used data models from business intelligence software to recommend decisions
around the show based on their subscribers’ preferences. This kind of act significantly increase Netflix new
customer and at the same time increase Netflix customer retention rate compare to other competitors. Also,
with the data, Netflix can create a personalized profile of their user according to their preferences on movies
and TV shows with will make it easier for the user to watch what they like without the need to scroll down the
list of the catalogue.

However, without a proper way in dealing business intelligence, a company may face a failure not because of
the technology but by the people itself. Sometimes the decision to develop a business intelligence might be
go wrong because there is no expertise in the company that can handle the system. Other reason for failure
is the struggle with time to value for BI due to unclear scopes, lack of skilled personnel, lack of prioritization,
and data quality issues. From a survey gather, most of the data professional responded that any activities such
as purchasing, implementing or scaling a solution, most of the BI teams are just to slow in meeting the business
needs with can cause the company suffered loss.

From my point of view, component that was impacted the most out of the use of BI is value propositions. Most
of BI is develop to know data of preferences for a customer so that they can utilize the information to gain their
loyalty which can increase their retention and engagement rate with the customer. Company that can give
more value to the customer such as good performance and new product can make the customer feel that the
company really into taking care of their preference and needs instead of just normal customer-buyer
relationship.