CHAPTER 8 -> Accessing Organizational Information (Data Warehouse)

1. ROLES AND PURPOSES OF DATA WAREHOUSES AND DATA MART IN ORGANIZATION 

The purpose of the Data Warehouse in the overall Data Warehousing Architecture is to integrate corporate data.  It contains the "single version of truth" for the organization that has been carefully constructed from data stored in disparate internal and external operational databases.

The amount of data in the Data Warehouse is massive.  Data is stored at a very granular level of detail.  For example, every "sale" that has ever occurred in the organization is recorded and related to dimensions of interest.  This allows data to be sliced and diced, summed and grouped in unimaginable ways. 

          Typical Data Warehousing Environment

Contrary to popular opinion, the Data Warehouses does not contain all the data in the organization.  It's purpose is to provide key business metrics that are needed by the organization for strategic and tactical decision making.

Decision makers don't access the Data Warehouse directly.  This is done through various front-end Data Warehouse Tools that read data from subject specific Data Marts.

The Data Warehouse can be either "relational" or "dimensional".  This depends on how the business intends to use the information.

2. The relationship of business intelligence and data warehousing 

 changing data into information and knowledge.

Many of the tool vendors who sell their products or software call it business Intelligence software rather than Data warehousing software. so what is it? 

Business Intelligence is a term commonly associated with data warehousing. Business Intelligence is a generalized term where a company initiates various activities to gather today's market information which also includes about their competitor. Today's business Intelligence systems are contrasted to more classical way of information gathering in mining and crunching the data in the most optimal manner. In short we can say BI simplifies information discovery and analysis. 

In this way the company will have a competitive advantage of business and intelligently using the available data in strategic and effective decision making. it has the ability to bring disparate data under one roof  with a meaningful information and ready for analysis.

so what has Data warehousing to do with Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions on. A data warehousing (or data mart) system is the backed  or the infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence. Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstructured data.

Example, data warehousing. All the source data from disparate sources are used to load/Stage data. Different sources can be flat files, another database or some other process. The starting point of the Data warehouse should extract the data in order to load into its environment.This is extracting. This data may not be the expected format or size. your business demands are different or your organization business requirements are different. So the business process has to modify the data or better word is to transform the incoming data to meet requirements and objectives. This is called Transformation. 

Once every slicing and dicing of the data is done along with applied business rules, this data is ready for loading into the target tables. This process is called Loading. So overall till now we have done Extraction, Transformation and Loading. In short we call this ETL. There are lot of tools available in today's market which does help in achieving the ETL process. Once this data is loaded in to the database, this is ready for next processing. We call that database as Data warehouse database. 

The next process could be building of data marts or directly reporting from it. There are lot of tools or software available for reporting/analysis. Some call it business reporting or analysis tool. But if you see the whole process has intelligence involved in business. we can call this or the gurus call it Data warehousing and the system involved from end to end is called business intelligence system. 

STORING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION - DATABASES

 Hye. This is the answer for the learning outcome.



(1) define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model

Concept of a database is that of a collection of records or pieces of information which is a structural description of the type of facts held in database known as a schema. Schema describe the objects that are represented in the database and the relationships among them. There are ways of organizing a schema modelling the database structure known as database models or data models. but nowadays, Relational model is commonly used which is all information in the form of multiple related tables each consisting of rows and columns. this model represents relationships by the use of values common to more than one table. Hierarchy model and the network model is use a more explicit representation of relationships.

(2) evaluate the advantages of the relational database model 

• increased flexibility
• increased scalability and performance
• reduced information redundancy
• increased information integrity (quality)
•  increased information security

INCREASED FLEXIBILITY

• good database that can handle changes quickly and easily
• physical view of information deals with the physical storage of information on a storage device such as a hard disk
• logical view of information focuses on how users logically access information to meet their particular business needs

INCREASED SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE

• scalability refers to how well a system can adapt to increase demand
• performance measures how quickly a systems performs a certain process or transaction

REDUCED INFORMATION REDUNDANCY

• redundancy is the duplication of information, or storing the same information in multiple places
• occurs bcoz organizations frequently capture and store the same information in multiple locations.
• primary problem with redundant is that it is often inconsistent which makes it difficult to determine which values are most current or most accurate

INCREASED INFORMATION INTEGRITY (QUALITY)

• measures of the quality of information
• database environment, integrity constraints are rules that help ensure the quality of information 
• two types of integrity:

(1) relational integrity constraints - enforce bacic & fundamental information based constraints

(2) business (critical integrity constraints) - enforce business rules vital to an organization's success and often require more insight and knowledge than relational integrity constraints

INCREASED INFORMATION SECURITY

• organizational asset
• as systems become increasingly complex and more available over the internet, security becomes an even bigger issue
• offer many security features including passwords access levels, and access controls
• password provide authentication of the user

 (3) define the database management system (DBMS) and its relationship to a website

 DBMS is software through which users and application programs interact with a database. The user sends requests to the DBMS and the DBMS performs the actual manipulation of the information in the database. there are two primary ways that users can interact with a DBMS, directly and indirectly. 

(4) explain why an organization would want to integrate its database

by integrating its systems or building connections between its many database, its allow the organizations multiple system to automatically communicate by passing information between the databases, eliminating the need for manual information entry into multiple systems because after entering the information once, the integrations send the information immediately to all databases. the integrations not only enable the different departments to share information, but have also dramatically increased the quality of the information. without integrations, an organization will,

1. spend considerable time entering the same information in multiple system

2. suffer from the low quality and inconsistency typically embedded in redundant information

Chapter five - Organizational structure the support strategic initiative

IT roles and responsibilities

    Information technology is a relatively new functional area, having been around formally in most organizations only for about 40 years. Job titles, roles, and responsibilities often differ dramatically from organization to organization.

    Most organizations maintain positions such as chief executive officer(CEO), Chief Financial Officer(CFO), and Chief Operations Officer(COO) at the strategic level. Recently there are more IT related strategic position such as Chief Information Officer(CTO), Chief Security Officer(CSO), Chief Privacy Officer(CPO),and Chief Knowledge Officer(CKO).

Chief Information Officer (CIO)
CIO is responsible overseeing all uses of information technology and ensuring the uses of IT is related with business goal and objectives. CIO will report directly to the CEO. Under CIO there will be a manager who are conduct all the IT project to be on time and within budget. There will also have a loader so that the strategic vision of IT is in line with the company strategic vision.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
CTO is the person who responsible about the throughput, speed, accuracy and availability. The function of CTO are similar with CIO except the CIO have additional responsibility which is make sure IT are aligned with company strategic initiative.

Chief Security Officer (CSO)
CSO is like a policeman of the company's IT system. They are responsible to make sure that the IT system of the company are safe against attack from hackers and viruses. The employment of the CSO are being increased every year because of the number of hackers and viruses. Most CSO must have the ability to create a security system and also the ways to solve the attack and viruses.

Chief Privacy Officer (CPO)
CPO are responsible to ensure the ethical and legal use if information within an organization. Usually they are only dealing with the internal staff because only them are using the information. This position is the newest position is the newest position in IT. Many CPO employed are lawyers by training which enabling them to understand the often complex legal issue surrounding the use of information.

Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO)
CKO are responsible in collecting, maintains and distributing the organization's knowledge. CKO also will create the system so that the information can stored easily and can be reuse knowledge. The CKO also make sure that all the employees are updated the organization.
 

 

Effectiveness of Facebook Marketing

A lot has been made of the performance of Facebook in recent months. In particular, conflicting reports have shown to be both an effective means for business to target their advertising dollors. But despite those dueling finding, small business may not want to automatically write off advertising on Facebook, especially if it is done correctly and expertations are managed.

Benefit
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Effective.
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