Business Research Project: Part I

Business research is an essential element involved in the managerial decision making process. It is the goal of the manager to encourage actions that lead to the highest return. In business, data can be collected from multiple different avenues and compiled in order to provide insight in the decision making process with the ultimate goal of increasing company performance. Therefore, research can be performed in order to assist in making the decision with the best possible outcome. The first step in the business research process is determining a research question (Cooper & Schindler, 2014).

Trifold Investment Group

Trifold Investment Group is an investment company who has been in business for almost three years.  This organization offers advice to its customers in order to help them make better investment decisions.  These decisions are based on the knowledge of the employee as well as the database that it is currently using, Agevest, to supply all the up-to-date stock market data information for the customers. Top management has to decide if they should invest in an updated, new state-of-the-art database system that will allow them to receive the daily and quarterly numbers for its clients. Currently, the quickest turnaround time on stock market data is twenty-five hours. The new system - Invest.Live - allows employees and management to retrieve information nation and worldwide in a matter of seconds which helps customers to profit better and allows for them to make optimal investment decisions. Because Trifold is a fairly new company, management needs to decide if purchasing this new program would prove more beneficial than the old one as additional funding would be required to purchase it.

Research Problem

Independent Variable

The independent variable is the database used and advice given to the customers. The database used is either more or less proficient and the advice given is either useful or obsolete.

Dependent Variable

The dependent variable is the length of the turnaround time for the stock data, and the customers' profit. The dependent variable is dependent on the turnaround time for the stock data.

Research Question

Which database should Trifold Investment Group use based on the relationship between the customers' profit and the turnaround time on the stock data with the different types of databases used?

Hypothesis Statement

The following research questions are null and alternate hypotheses:

Ho:  The Agevest provides a better return on investment than Invest.live.

H1:  The Invest.live provides a better return on investment than Agevest.

Ho:  The advice given by employees will result in higher profits for the customer.

H1:  The advice given by employees will result in lower profits for the customer.

Ho:  A new database can be seen as more appealing, thus bringing more customers aboard.

H1:  A new database can be seen as more appealing, but will not help bring more customers aboard.

Conclusion

The research process can be broken down into multiple steps, the first of which is evaluating the management dilemma of focus in order to construct a research question. It has been identified that the research question at hand is to determine if Trifold Investment group should purchase the Invest.live or continue using Agevest as their database to provide market data to help customers make investment decisions. By conducting further research management will be able to determine the most profitable outcome.

References

Cooper, D. & Schindler, P. (2014). Business research methods (11th ed). McGraw-Hill Education. The United States of America.