How do you organize the files on
your computer? Perhaps in folders sorted by date, category, alphabetically, or
maybe even scattered about on your desktop. The differences in database
organization between one employee can be completely different than the next and
this is why IT implements a database management system (DBMS). DBMS solves the
problems of files that are miss-labeled, duplicated, and hard to protect. A
DBMS is defined as, “software that permits an organization to centralize data,
manage them efficiently, and provide access to the stored data by application
programs.” (Laudon 212).
I work at Chesapeake Energy, an oil
and gas company, and we have a data warehouse called the Enterprise Data
Warehouse (EDW) to house all information on millions of oil and gas wells. The
data comes from various parts of the company. The Land Department has
information regarding leases, production volumes come from the Operations Department,
and all of the financial information for each well comes from the Accounting
and Revenue Departments. Data is
flowing constantly into the EDW and all of the different software applications
that each department use must interface with the others for the information to
be dumped in the EDW. This ultimately streamlines all of the data and makes it
accessible to all departments within the company. The EDW is a wonderful IT
tool that makes our jobs a lot easier.
In addition to data warehouses,
some companies build data marts. Data marts are smaller data warehouses for a
particular group of users. One example might be a data mart for human resources
that contains personal employee information and another data mart for payroll
that incorporates some of the personal information but also includes salaries.
Some companies might be large enough to combine the two into one data warehouse
or for the sake of managing and protecting the data, they may choose to leave
it separate.
Once the data is comprised into a
central location, IT can build tools for reporting, online analytical
processing, and data mining. Online analytical processing (OLAP), “supports multidimensional
data analysis, enabling users to view the same data in different ways using
multiple dimensions.” (Laundon 224). Data mining dives deeper into the data to
find hidden patterns and links using associations, sequences, classifications,
clusters, and forecasts.
The IT department within a firm is
responsible for creating an information policy. When all of the valuable,
personal, and financial information of a company is stored in one place, it’s
quite possible that someone will try to use this information in a negative way.
A clearly defined information policy will help employees understand the firm’s
rules for using, changing, and sharing the vital data. The data administration
group is responsible for ensuring the policy is updated and managed. Another
area of the IT department will be responsible for maintaining the data within
the warehouse and upgrading it to meet the needs of the firm.
Source: Laudon, Kenneth C. & Jane P. Laudon. Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm 12th ed. Pearson Hall, 2010.
Source: Laudon, Kenneth C. & Jane P. Laudon. Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm 12th ed. Pearson Hall, 2010.
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