Study Guide #2

Question 1

Information Levels

Answer 1

-individual, department, enterprise

+individual knowledge, goals, and strategies
+department goals, revenues, expenses, processes, and strategies
+enterprise revenues, expenses, processes, and strategies

Question 2

Information Formats

Answer 2

-document, presentation, spreadsheet, database

+letters, memos, faxes, emails, reports, marketing materials, and training methods
+Product, strategy, process, financial, customer, and competitor
+Sales, marketing, industry, financial, competitor, customer, and order spreadsheets
+Customer, employee, sales, order, supplier, and manufacturer databases

Question 3

Information Granularities

Answer 3

-Details (Fine), Summary, Aggregate (Coarse)

+reports for each salesperson, product, and part
+reports for all sales personnel, all products, and all parts
+reports across departments, organizations, and companies

Question 4

Differentiate between transactional and analytical information

Answer 4

Transactional information
-Encompasses all of the info used in a business process
-Required to support performing operational tasks
EX: What’s recorded during…
…an ATM transaction? (Date/time, amount, customer, account, location)
…a customer checkout? (Items, quantities, payment method, date, clerk, customer)
…an airline reservation? (Flight number(s), seat number, payment method, customer info, etc)

Analytical information
-Encompasses all organizational information
-Used to solve new/unstructured business problems, make ad-hoc (irregular) managerial decisions, etc.
EX: Summarized transactional information
(Weekly sales by product, region, customer, etc)
…Website data (User click patterns, abandoned shopping carts, etc)
…Mobile app data (Location data, preferences, settings, clicks)
…External data purchased from marketing firm
(Consumer demographics and preferences)
…Supply chain data (Supplier info like quality, service, product ratings)

Question 5

Understand the impact of low quality information on an organization and the benefits of high quality information on an organization

Answer 5

Business decisions are only as good as the quality of the information used to make the decisions

Question 6

Characteristics of high-quality information

Answer 6

accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness, timeliness

Question 7

Accuracy

Answer 7

Are all of the values correct?
(names spelled correctly, $ value right)
-misspellings, letters in phone numbers

Question 8

Completeness

Answer 8

Is all or part of a value missing? (does the address include a zip code?)
-number missing from address, area code mission from phone number

Question 9

Consistency

Answer 9

Does summary data equal the aggregation of the parts? (does the sum of the line items = total value?)
-overall company sales not equal to the sum of the individual stores, total salary not equal to individual employees’ salary

Question 10

Uniqueness

Answer 10

Are elements of the data represented only once? (Do we have the same customer listed twice?)
-the same customer entered more than once

Question 11

Timeliness

Answer 11

Is the information current with respect to the business requirements? (Was the data updated today on schedule?)
-stock broker making decisions based on 20 minute delayed stock data

Question 12

Database

Answer 12

+What: A collection of data organized for search and retrieval
+Why: To simplify and ensure quality of data in:
Data management
Data storage
Data retrieval
+Who: Everyone
+Where: Datacenters (local or on cloud)

Question 13

Database Benefits

Answer 13

• information integrity (ex: fall within a specified range)
• physical view and logical views
• forms & reports
• security: access management functions (Password, access levels, and access controls)

Question 14

Relational model

Answer 14

• the primary data structure is the table

- tables are tied together, or RELATED, based on certain types of shared data

Question 15

Integrity constraints

Answer 15

are sets of rules that can help maintain the quality of information that is put up. Integrity constraints are mostly used when trying to promote accuracy and consistency of data that is found in a relational database. This is very important to companies because information can be considered as an asset to certain organizations and it must be protected.
-Examples:
· Users cannot create an order for a nonexistent customer
· An order cannot be shipped without an address.

Question 16

Business-critical integrity constraints

Answer 16

In database management, business-critical integrity constraints enforce a company’s rules. For example, a company can code a constraint that prevents a checkout counter from giving a customer a discount greater than 25 percent or refuses returns of produce purchased more than 15 days ago. Business constraints require more in-depth knowledge than relational constraints, which enforce rules fundamental to any database. For instance, a relational constraint stops an administrator from creating an order for a nonexistent customer.

Question 17

Database management systems (DBMS)

Answer 17

are specially designed software applications that interact with the user, other applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze data. A general-purpose DBMS is a software system designed to allow the definition, creation, querying, update, and administration of databases.

Question 18

Data intregration

Answer 18

involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data.