College of Accountancy and Business Administration

Second Semester, A.Y. 2020-2021

APC3 Managing Information and Technology

DATA RESOURCE

MANAGING DATA

Organizations win by making good decisions fast, and organizations cannot do so without a highquality
data resource.

Managing data as a resource has many general business dimensions, it is also important for the
costeffective development and operation of information systems. Poor systems development productivity is
frequently due to a lack of data management, and some methods, such as prototyping, cannot work unless
the source of data is clear and the data are available. Systems development time is greatly enhanced by
the reuse of data and pro- grams as new applications are designed and built. Unless data are cataloged,
named in standard ways, protected but accessible to those with a need to know, and maintained with high
quality, the data and the programs that capture and maintain them cannot be reused.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF MANAGING THE DATA RESOURCE

Data Model – overall map for business data

- shows rules by which the organization operates, such as whether a customer order must be
associated with a salesperson, an employee must have a social security number, or the maximum
number of direct reports for a supervisor.

Data modeling involves both a methodology and a notation.

The methodology includes the steps that are followed to identify and describe organizational data entities,
and the notation is a way to show these findings, usually graphically. Managers must be integrally involved
in these methodologies to ensure that the data you need are planned for inclusion in organizational
databases and that the data captured and stored have the required business meaning. Several possible
methodologies are introduced in the following paragraphs, but the reader is referred to texts on database
management for a detailed discussion of data modeling notations.

Entity-Relationship Diagram - captures entities (i.e., customer, order, product) and their relationships (i.e.,
submits, includes).
- is the most commonly accepted notation for representing the data needs in an organization.
- consists of:
1. entities, or the things about which data are collected;
2. attributes, the actual elements of data that are to be collected;
3. relationships, the relevant associations between organizational entities.
- is only part of metadata, or data about data, needed to unambiguously describe data for the enterprise.

Entity-Relationship Diagram

Metadata - documents the meaning and all the business rules that govern data.
 Example: About an attribute of customer name would define this term, state its properties such as
maximum length and the type of data (alphanumeric characters) that a value of this attribute might have,
whether every customer has to have a name to be stored in the database, whether the name can change in
value over time, whether there can be multiple instances of the name, and who has rights to enter and
change the name.
- These metadata rules come from the nature of the organization, so business
managers are typically the source of the knowledge to develop these rules.
- using the concept of data steward, to actively manage the metadata for each
subject area of the business. This allowed subtle differences in customer data to be recognized and
accepted and for data to be stored accurately.

The role of data modeling as part of IS planning is essential.

Two different approaches:
1. Top-down or enterprise modeling - involves describing the organization and its data
requirements at a very high level
- independent of particular reports, screens, or
detailed descriptions of data processing requirements.
- has the advantage of not being biased by a lot of
details, current databases and files, or how the business actually operates today.
- it is future oriented and should identify a
comprehensive set of generic data requirements but, on the other hand, it can be incomplete
or inaccurate because it might ignore some important details.
Three-level decomposition of the business data:
a. the work of the organization is divided into its major functions (e.g., selling, billing,
manufacturing, and servicing).
b. each of these functions is further divided into processes and
c. each process into activities An activity is usually described at a rather high level (e.g.,
“forecast sales for next quarter”). This three-level decomposition of the business

2. Bottom-up or view integration – the data elements in each user view are identified and put into
a basic structure.
- After each user view has been normalized, they are all
combined (or integrated) into one comprehensive description. Ideally, this integrated set of
entities from normalization will match those from enterprise modeling.

User view - each report, computer screen, form, document, and so on to be produced from
organizational databases Normal form - basic structure
Normalization - the process of creating simple data structures from more complex ones
- consists of a set of rules that yields a data structure that is very stable
and useful across many different requirements.
- is used as a tool to rid data of troublesome anomalies associated with
inserting, deleting, and updating data.
 Many organizations choose to use both approaches because they are complementary
methods that emphasize different aspects of data and, hence, check and balance each other.

Guidelines on Data Modeling:

• Objective - the modeling effort must be justified by some clear overriding need, such as
coordination of operational data processing, flexibility to access data, or effectiveness of data
systems. The less clear the goal, the higher the chance for failure.
• Scope - the coverage for a data model must be carefully considered.
- the broader the scope, the more difficult the project is to manage. -
Scope choices include:
corporate-wide, division, areas with particular high-impact
needs, and a particularly important or willing business function
(e.g., sales).
• Outcome – the more uncertain the outcome, the lower the chances for success.
- choices here include:
1. a subject area database definition
Example: all data about customers
2. identification of common data capture systems to be shared by several departments
(replacing current separate databases),
3. managerial and strategic databases and access services to support the information
needs of these levels of management, and
4. a more nebulous architecture for future databases.

The Data Pyramid

• Timing - few organizations can put all systems development on hold while a complete data model
is developed
Example: to develop only a high-level data model (with just major data categories) and
then fill in details as major systems projects are undertaken.

A business manager often simply wants access to needed data and is not interested in
waiting for an entire data model to be built.

Independent schemes for understanding levels of data.

• Local data - are those that have relevance to only a single user or small group of organization
members.
- do not need extensive control and do not need to follow organizational standards.
- may have limited life and use, and it is acceptable that local data may be duplicated (and
inconsistent) across the organization.

• Shared data - are those that are exchanged between different user groups, and hence there must be
agreements on the definition, format, and timing for exchange of these data among those sharing the
data.
 - exists because of a dependency between different organizational units or functions. • Core
data - are those that require an organization-wide definition and sourcing (in other words, core data is
enterprise-shared data).
- there may be one copy of core data, but if there are multiple copies, the creation of
these copies are carefully planned and managed.

The concept of application independence suggests that different data processing applications can be
classified into three groups, based upon their role in managing data:
1. data capture - gather data and populate the database. They store and maintain data
- ach datum is captured once and fully tested for accuracy and
completeness.
2. data transfer and integration applications - move data from one database to another or otherwise
bring together data from various databases to meet some processing need.
- often called bridges or interfaces because they
connect related databases.
3. data analysis and presentation - provide data and information to authorized persons.

MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT (MDM)

Almost all information systems and databases refer to common subject areas of data
Example: people,
things, places
often enhance common data with local data relevant to only that application or database.

Master data management (MDM) - refers to the disciplines, technologies, and methods to ensure the
currency, meaning, and quality of reference data within and across various subject areas (White and
Imhoff, 2006).
- ensures that everyone knows the current description of
product, the current salary of an employee, and the current billing address of a customer.
- does not address sharing transactional data, such as
customer purchases.
- supports all uses of data, from operational to business intelligence
- to be successful, an organization must create a strong data governance process, often
including data stewards.

DATA MANAGEMENT FUNCTION:

1. Plan - data resource planning develops a blueprint for data and the relationships among data across
business units and functions. The plan identifies which data are required, where they are used in
the business, how they will be used (i.e., what they will be used to produce), and how much data
are expected. This plan must then be communicated to all business functions that are involved in
aspects of data resource management.
2. Source - when selecting an external data source, the original source, the reliability of the data, the
timing of when the data are needed and when they were collected, the precision and detail
collected, and other factors should be checked.
Example: different market research organizations might collect competitive sales data from
retail outlets or telephone surveys.
3. Acquire and Maintain - once the best sources for data are identified and selected, data capture
systems must be built to acquire and maintain these data. Users of the data need to know when the
data are refreshed and perhaps automatically be informed of exceptional conditions (e.g., inventory
being out of stock, stock price below a critical level, or receipt of an especially large customer
order). Appropriate applications systems need to be built to track data acquisition and transfer.
 Example: suppose electronic files of customer list data are sent to telemarketing vendors for a
promotional campaign and results are returned via the Internet.
4. Define/Describe and Inventory - a basic step in managing any resource is defining what is being
managed. For a real estate manager, each property must be described, standards and scales must
be set to define the size and shape of each building or land parcel, and terminology must be defined
to refer to different pieces of each building. Similarly, in managing data, each data entity, data
element, and relationship must be defined, a format for storage and reporting established, and the
organization of the data described so users know how to access the data.
5. Organize and Make Accessible - data should be arranged and stored so that information can be
produced easily. Two aspects of data usage necessary for proper organization are:
a. what data are required and
b. how the data are to be selected.
Example: database designers need to know if customer data will be selected by markets, by
geographical regions, by what products they have bought, through what sales staff they buy, or by
other criteria. Orders of magnitude improvements in processing speed can be achieved when the
data organization is well-tuned to the processing requirements.
6. Control Quality and Integrity - periodic checks of databases should be made as part of the audit of
financial records. Data quality is an especially critical issue when data are considered a corporate
asset. The more data are used to support organizational operations, the cleaner the data should be.
Example: when the data are combined with a customer relationship management (CRM)
application, data quality problems can lead to mismanaged relationships and result in lost
sales. Data are essential in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and data
warehousing.
The quality of the data has a direct relationship to the quality of the processes performed by these
systems. Data quality initiatives, like master data management, can be difficult to justify. These
programs look like overhead.
7. Protect and Secure - the rights each manager has to each type of data must be defined. Privileges
for use of data might include definition, retrieval, insertion, deletion, update, and retrieval of the
datum by itself or in combination with other values.
Example: a business manager might be permitted to see the salaries of everyone in his
department but might not be able to match names with salaries.
Privileges can be assigned to programs, databases, files, individual records or data elements,
terminals, and workstations.
8. Account for Use - because there is considerable cost to capture, maintain, and report data, these
costs must be identified, and an accounting system developed to report them. Two conditions make
accounting for the use of data especially difficult as compared to other information resources:
a. frequently the organizational unit responsible for acquiring data is not the primary user of
the data.
b. usage is shared because data are not consumed from usage.
9. Recover/Restore and Upgrade - when an asset becomes old or damaged, it is often renovated and
put back into operation. The same process is true with organizational data. When a database is
damaged because of some hardware or software malfunction, procedures must be in place to
restore the database to a clean and uncontaminated condition. The business manager must
anticipate what needs to be done in the business when a database is not accessible because of a
recovery or upgrading that temporarily takes the database out of action.
10. Determine Retention and Dispose - business managers must decide on legal and other grounds,
how much data history needs to be kept. Data should be summarized, eliminated, and/or moved to
the data warehouse. Keeping data too long is not only costly in terms of storage space, but the use
of out-of-date data can also bias forecasts and other analyses. With the trend toward data
warehousing, a new mechanism exists to retain data to aid in organizational decision making.
11. Train and Consult for Effective Use - just because data exist, they will not necessarily be effectively
used. This training might include review of the contents of the corporate data dictionary, with an
emphasis on a particular user group (e.g., consumer marketing), or the training might be on how to
use/access a database for decision support.