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Data Resource Management

Chapter 3 OBrien, James A.,
Management Information Systems,
6
th
edition, McGraw-Hill, USA, 2004.
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Managing Data Resources
Data are a vital organizational resource that need to
be managed like other important business assets.
Therefore data resource management is required.
Database management systems and / or
datawarehouse are used to accomplish this.
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Foundation of Data Concepts (1)
Data are logically organized into characters, fields,
records, files, and databases.
The most basic logical data element is the character,
which consists of a single alphabet, numeric, or
other symbol.
The next higher level of data is the field. A field
consists of grouping of characters. For example, the
grouping of alphabetic characters in a person's name
forms a name field, and the grouping of numbers in
a sales amount forms a sales amount field.
Related fields of data are grouped to form a record.
Thus a record represents a collection of attributes
that describe an entity.
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Foundation of Data Concepts (2)
A group of related records is a data file or table.
Thus, an employee file would contain the records of
the employees of a firm. Files are frequently class-
ified by the application for which they are primarily
used, such as payroll file or an inventory file.
They can also be classified by the type of data they
contain, such as a document file or a graphical
image file.
Files are also classified by their permanence for
example, a payroll master file versus a payroll
weekly transaction file.
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Foundation of Data Concepts (3)
A database is an integrated collection of logically
related records or objects.
A database consolidates records previously stored in
separate files into a common pool of data records
that provides data for many applications.
The data stored in a database are independent of the
application programs using them and of the type of
secondary storage devices on which they are stored.
See Fig. 3.2 page 72 OBrien for illustration of how
the concepts of data are realized into database.
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Types of Databases (1)
Major conceptual categories of databases that may
be found in computer-using organizations:
Operational Databases stores detailed data needed
to support the operations of the entire organization.
Distributed Databases. Many organizations
replicate and distribute copies or parts of databases
to network servers at different sites. Such replicated
databases are distributed databases.
External Databases. Access to information from
commercial online services with or without charge.
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Types of Databases (2)
Hypermedia Databases consists of hyperlinked
pages of multimedia (text, graphic, image, video
clips, audio segments, etc.). This database inter-
connects interrelated hypermedia page elements.
Data Warehouse stores data from current and
previous years that has been extracted from various
operational databases.
Data Marts hold subsets of data from the
datawarehouse that focus on specific aspects of a
company (such as a department or a business
process).
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Types of Databases (3)
Data Mining is a major use of datawarehouse.
Data in a datawarehouse is analyzed to reveal
hidden patterns and trends in historical business
activities.
The analysis can be used to help managers make
decisions about strategic changes in business
operations to gain competitive advantages in the
marketplace.
Advanced pattern recognition algorithms,
mathematical and statistical techniques are used to
extract strategic business information from data.
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Database Management Approach
The development of databases and database
management software is the foundation of modern
methods of managing organizational data.
database management system is a software tool that
controls the creation, maintenance, and use of the
database of an organization and its and users.
Typical capabilities in database management
approach:
create -- database application development -- by using 4
th

GL programming language
manage -- database maintenance -- accomplished by
transaction processing systems (TPS)
database usage -- database interrogation -- query or
report generator
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Data Resource Management (1)
Database management is an important application of
IS technology to the management of a firm's data
resources.
Database Administration. This is an important data
resource management function responsible for the
proper use of database management technology,
including the responsibility for developing and
maintaining the organization's data dictionary,
designing and monitoring the performance of
databases, and enforcing standards for database use
and security.
Data Planning. This is a corporate planning and
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Data Resource Management (2)
analysis function that focuses on data resource
management. It includes the responsibility for
developing an overall data architecture for the firm's
data resources that ties in with the firm's strategic
mission and plans, and the objectives and processes
of its business units.
Data Administration. This is also a vital data
resource management function. It involves the
establishment and enforcement of policies and
procedures for managing data as a strategic
corporate resource. The focus is the control of data
in support of an organization's business functions
and strategic business objectives.
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Relational Database Model
This model has become the most popular of earlier
structures (hierarchical structure and network struc-
ture), in which all data elements within the database
are viewed as being stored in the form of tables.
Multidimensional structure is a variation of the
relational model that uses multidimensional
structures to organize data and express the
relationships between data. This structure can be
visualized as cubes of data and cubes within cubes
of data. Each side of the cube is considered a
dimension of the data. Each cell within a
multidimensional structure contains aggregated data
related to elements along each of its dimensions.
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Object-Oriented (OO) Structure
OO database is considered to be one of the key
technologies of a new generation of multimedia
Web-based applications.
An object consists of data values describing the
attributes of an entity, plus the operations that can be
performed upon the data. This encapsulation
capability allows the object-oriented model to better
handle more complex types of data (graphics,
pictures, voices, text) than other database structures.
The OO model also supports inheritance (new
objects can be automatically created by replicating
some or all of the characteristics of one or more
parent objects.
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Database Planning and Design (1)
Database development may start with a top-down
data planning process, as seen in Fig. 3.23 p. 93
OBrien.
Data administrators and designers work with
corporate and end-user management to develop an
enterprise model that defines the basic business
processes of the enterprise.
They then define the information needs of end users
in a business process.
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Database Planning and Design (2)
Next, end users identify the key data elements that
are needed to perform their specific business
activities. this often involves Entity Relationships
diagrams (ERDs) that model the relationships
among many entities involved in business processes.
Data models represent logical views of the data and
relationships of the database. Physical database
design takes a physical view of the data tat describes
how data are to be physically stored and accessed on
the storage device.