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BONUS Real HOT Group Projects
For more Real HOT Group Projects, search the six BONUS cases, below. Click the hotlinks to access the relevant data files.

CASE A

Assessing the Value of Information

Affordable Homes Real Estate

In late 1995 a national study announced that Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was the safest place to live. Since then housing development projects have been springing up all around Eau Claire. Six housing development projects are currently dominating the Eau Claire market—Woodland Hills, Granite Mound, Creek Side Huntington, East River Community, Forest Green, and Eau Claire South. These six projects each started with 100 homes, have sold all of them, and are currently developing phase 2.

As one of the three partners and real estate agents of Affordable Homes Real Estate, it is your responsibility to analyze the information concerning the past 600 home sales and choose which development project to focus on for selling homes in phase 2. Because your real estate firm is so small, you and your partners have decided that the firm should focus on selling homes in only one of the development projects.

From the Wisconsin Real Estate Association you have obtained a spreadsheet file that contains information concerning each of the sales for the first 600 homes. It contains the following fields:

Column	Name	Description
A	LOT #	The number assigned to a specific home within each project.
B	PROJECT #	A unique number assigned to each of the six housing development projects (see table below).
C	ASK PRICE	The initial posted asking price for the home.
D	SELL PRICE	The actual price for which the home was sold.
E	LIST DATE	The date the home was listed for sale.
F	SALE DATE	The date on which the final contract closed and the home was sold.
G	SQ. FT.	The total square footage for the home.
H	# BATH.	The number of bathrooms in the home.
I	#BDRMS	The number of bedrooms in the home.

The following numbers have been assigned to each of the housing development projects:

Project #	Project Name
23	Woodland Hills
47	Granite Mound
61	Creek Side Huntington
78	East River Community
92	Forest Green
97	Eau Claire South

It is your responsibility to analyze the sales list and prepare a report that details which housing development project your real estate firm should focus on. Your analysis should be from as many angles as possible.

Some Particulars You Should Know

1. You don’t know how many other real estate firms will also be competing for sales in each of the housing development projects.
2. Phase 2 for each housing development project will develop homes similar in style, price, and square footage to their respective first phases.
3. As you consider the information provided to you, think in terms of what information is important and what information is not important. Also, don’t forget about the time and content dimensions discussed in Chapter 1. Be prepared to justify, by time and content, how you went about your analysis.
4. Upon completing your analysis, please provide concise, yet detailed and thorough, documentation (in narrative, numeric, and graphic forms) that justifies your decision. In this instance, consider the form dimension of information as you prepare your presentation.
5. Data File: Real Estate Spreadsheet (66.0K)

CASE B

Executive Information System Reporting

Political Campaign Finance Consultants

When it comes to campaign finance, Americans want a system that minimizes the influence of “fat cats” and organized money, which keeps campaign spending at “sensible” levels, that fosters healthy electoral competition, that doesn’t take advantage of wealthy candidates, and that doesn’t require candidates to spend all of their waking hours raising money.

Indeed, the much maligned congressional campaign finance system we have now is itself a product of well-intended reform efforts, passed by Congress in 1974 to achieve these ideals. Moreover, dozens of new reform plans have emerged during the 1990s that also reach for these goals. Yet, no reform scheme, however well intended, is likely to produce a perfect congressional campaign finance system because no plan can surmount the considerable obstacles in the way of doing so candidates, reduce the financial advantage enjoyed by wealthy candidates, and promote electoral competition.

The city of Highlands Ranch Colorado wishes to organize their campaign contributions records in a more linear format. The city council people are considering various executive information system packages that can show them overall information views of the contribution data as well as give them the ability to access more detailed information. You have been hired to make recommendations about what reports should be available through the soon-to-be-purchased executive information system.

The table below is a list of the information that will be the foundation for the reports in the proposed executive information system. To help you develop realistic reports, the city has provided you with a spreadsheet file that contains specific sales over the last six months.

Column	Name	Description
A	DATE	The actual date that the contribution was made.
B	CONTRIBUTOR	The name of the person or organization that made the contribution.
C	DISTRICT	The district number that the councilperson belongs too.
D	AMOUNT	The amount of the contribution.
E	TYPE	The description type of where thecontribution amount was given.
F	COUNCILPERSON	The councilperson’s name.
G	PARTY	The councilperson’s political party.

What the city council people are most interested in is viewing several overall reports and then being able to request more detailed reports. So, as a consultant, your goal is to develop different sets of reports that illustrate the concept of drilling down through information. For example, you should develop a report that shows overall campaign contributions by district (each of the eight different districts) and then also develop more detailed reports that show contribution by political party and contribution by type.

Some Particulars You Should Know

1. The council people would much rather see information graphically than numerically. So as you develop your reports do so in terms of graphs that illustrate the desired relationships.
2. As you consider the information provided to you, think in terms of overall views first and then detailed views second. This will help you develop a logical series of reports.
3. If you wish, you can explore a variety of software tools to help you create the reports. When complete, prepare your presentation using a presentation graphics package that lets you create a really great presentation of your recommendations.
4. Again your goal is not to create reports that point toward a particular problem or opportunity. Rather you are to design sets of logical series of reports that illustrate the concept of drilling down.
5. Data File: Contribute Spreadsheet (95.0K)

CASE C

Building Value Chains

StarLight's Customers Define Value

StarLight, Inc., is a Denver-based retailer of high-quality apparel, shoes, and accessories. In 1915, with money earned in the Colorado gold mines, Anne Logan invested in a small downtown Denver shoe store. A few years later, Anne expanded her business by adding fine apparel. Today, StarLight has 97 retail stores and discount outlets throughout the United States. Since the beginning, StarLight's business philosophy has reflected its founder's beliefs in exceptional service, value, selection, and quality. To maintain the level of service StarLight's customers have come to expect, the company empowers its employees to meet any customer demand-no matter how unreasonable it may seem. With so many stores, it's difficult for Cody Sherrod, StarLight's VP for Business Information and Planning, to know the level of service customers receive, what customers value, and what they don't. These are important questions for a retailer striving to provide the finest customer experience and products while keeping costs to a minimum.

Cody decided a value chain analysis would be helpful in answering these questions. So, customer surveys were designed, distributed, completed, collected, and compiled into a database. Customers were asked to value their experience with various processes in the StarLight value chain. Specifically, for each value chain process customers were asked whether this area added value to their experience or reduced the value of their experience. Customers were asked to quantify how much each process added or reduced the value of the services they received. Using a total of 100 points for the value chain, each customer distributed those points among StarLight's processes. The survey results in the database consist of the fields shown in the accompanying table (on page 366).

Cody has asked you to gather the raw survey material into two value chains, the value-added chain and the value-reducing chain. You'll create chains that summarize the survey information and size the process areas proportionately as described in Chapter 2. Specifically, your job is to perform the following:

1. Create queries or reports in the provided database to summarize the value-added amounts and the value-reducing amounts for each process.
2. Draw two value chains using that summary information to size the depicted area for each process. Use the value chains in Chapter 2 as reference.
3. Compare the value-added and value-reducing process percentages. Do they correlate in any way? If so, why do you think that is? If not, why not?
4. In the table description provided, a dashed line is drawn between the "purchasing" process and the "receive and greet customers" process. Processes above the line are considered support processes, while processes below are considered primary processes. Create a database query to compare how customers value the total of support processes versus primary processes. Do this for both value-added and value-reducing processes. Do the results make sense or are they surprising? Explain why you think either way.

Some Particulars You Should Know

1. Remember that the total value-added/value-reducing amount for each process must equal 100 percent.
2. The survey values in the database are not percentages although the sum of all responses for a given survey equals 100.
3. File: STARLIGHT.mdb (Access Database)

CASE D

Demonstrating How to Build Web Sites With HTML

Building a good Web site is simple in some respects and difficult in others. It's relatively easy to learn to write HTML code. Building an effective and eye-catching Web site is a horse of a different color. That is to say, there is a stretch between just using the technology and using the technology to your best advantage.

Your task in this project is to build a presentation (using presentation graphics software such as Microsoft PowerPoint) that achieves two goals. First, your presentation should show your audience how to write simple HTML code to create a Web site. Your presentation should include the HTML code for:

• Text formatting (bold, italicize, and the like)
• Font families and sizing
• Font colors
• Background colors and images
• Links
• Images
• Numbered and bulleted lists

Next, your presentation should provide the audience with a list of guidelines for creating an effective Web site. For this, you should definitely embed links into your presentation that go to Web sites that illustrate good Web site design, displaying examples of both effective and ineffective designs.

Some Particulars You Should Know

1. In a file called HTML.doc, we've provided many links to Web sites that teach you how to write HTML code.
2. In a file called DESIGN.doc, we've provided many links to Web sites that teach you how to effectively design Web sites.
3. Data File HTML Word Document (26.0K)
   Data File Design Word Document (25.0K)

CASE E

e-classifieds@gabbygazzetteer.com

A WEB-BASED CLASSIFIED SYSTEM

With the emergence of the Internet as a worldwide standard for communicating information, Gabby's Gazetteer, a medium size community newspaper in central Colorado is looking to enter into the electronic commerce market. In listing of classified ads, an advertiser places a small ad that lists items that they wish to sell and provide a means (e.g. telephone number) by which prospective buyers can contact them.

The nature of a sale via a newspaper classified system goes as follows:

• During the course of the sale, the information flows in different directions at different stages.
• First, there is a downstream flow of information (from seller to buyer) - the listing in print on the newspaper. (Thus, the classified ad listing is just a way of bringing a buyer and seller together.)
• When a potential purchaser's interest has been raised, then that interest must be relayed upstream - usually by telephone or in person.
• Finally, a meeting should result that uses face-to-face negotiation to finalize the sale - if the sale can be agreed.

By placing the entire system on the Internet, the upstream and downstream communications are accomplished using a web browser. The sale becomes more of an auction, because many potential buyers, all with equal status, can bid for the same item. So it's fairer for all purchasers, and gets a better deal for the seller.

Any user who is trying to buy an item can:

• View items for sale
• Bid on an item they wish to purchase

Any user who is trying to sell an item can:

• Place a new item for sale
• Browse a list of the items that they're trying to sell, and examine the bids that have been made on each of those items
• Accept a bid on an item that they are selling

This system should also allow users to do some very basic administrative tasks like:

• Browse the listings to see what is for sale
• Register with the system (users can browse without registering; but they must register if they want to sell an item or bid for an item)
• Log on to the system
• Change their registration details

Your job will be to complete the following:

1. Develop and describe the entity-relationship.
2. Use normalization to ensure the correctness of the tables.
3. Create the database using a personal DBMS package.

Some Particulars You Should Know

1. Use the figure RHGP.2 as a baseline for your database design.
2. File: Not applicable.

CASE F

Higher Education Planning and Data Processing

ERP

The State Annual Report on Enterprise Resource Planning and Management was developed to provide a comprehensive view of the management and use of technology by the Higher Educational System of Colorado. This report shows the statewide issues surrounding information technology, priorities for the ensuing two years, initiatives and projects, performance management, and the information technology resources utilized to support the business processes of Higher Education during Fiscal Year 2000-2001. A comparison report is also generated to produce a percentage change in funds from Fiscal Year 1999-2000 and Fiscal Year 2000-2001.

Chief Information Officer for the Department of Higher Education, David Paul, was required to report the estimated expenditures for technology across five appropriation categories: Employee Salaries/Benefits, Other Personal Services (OPS - non-career service employees with no permanent status), Expenses (all hardware purchases under $1,000, travel, training, and general office expenses), Operating Capital Outlay (OCO), and Data Processing Services. Most of these performance management initiatives have been measured using manual processes. Several reporting units documented the need for automated measurement tools in the future to take advantage of the full opportunities for improvement. David Paul has asked you to assist him in organizing this information and calculating some of the requirements established by the State Board of Education. Along with the appropriation categories mentioned above each institution is categorized according to status (2 Year, 4 Year Public or 4 Year Private). This will aid in the overall analysis for current and future resource planning.

Some particulars you should know

1. You need to create a detailed report on:
   1. Summary of overall change from 1999-2000 FY and 2000-2001 FY
   2. Percentage of budget allocated to Data Processing Services
   3. Percentage of 2 Year, 4 Year Public and 4 Year Private institutions allocating resources to Data Processing Services.
2. Develop a graphical representation of the percentage of 2 Year, 4 Year Public and 4 Year Private institutions allocating resources to Data Processing Services
3. Data File Colorado HigherED (27.0K)