What are Informational Formats?
Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Database
What are informational levels?
Individual, Department, Enterprise
What are Information Granularities?
Detail (Fine), Summary, Aggregate (Coarse)
What is transactional information?
Encompasses all of the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks. (i.e. airline ticket, sales receipt, packing slip)
What is analytical information?
Encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks. (i.e. product statistics, sales projections, future growth, trends)
What are the characteristics of high-quality information?
- Accurate
- Complete
- Consistent
- Unique
- Timely
What are the four primary sources of low quality information?
- Customers intentionally enter inaccurate information to protect their privacy
- Different entry standards and formats
- Operators enter abbreviated or erroneous information by accident or to save time
- Third party and external information contains inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and errors.
What are the potential business effects resulting from low quality information?
- Inability to accurately track customers
- Difficulty identifying valuable customers
- Inability to identify selling opportunities
- Marketing to nonexistent customers
- Difficulty tracking revenue
- Inability to build strong customer relationships
What are the benefits of good information?
- High quality information can significantly improve the chances of making a good decision.
- Good decisions can directly impact an organization’s bottom line.
What is an entity?
A person, place, thing, transaction, or event about which information is stored. (i.e. The rows in a table contain entities)
What is an attribute (field, column)?
The data elements associated with an entity. (i.e. the columns in each table contain the attributes)
What is a record?
A collection of related data elements.
What is a primary key?
A field (or group of fields) that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table.
What is a foreign key?
A primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship among the two tables.
What are the primary goals of a database?
- Increased Flexibility
- Increased Scalability and Performance
- Reduced Information Redundancy
- Increased Information Integrity
- Increased Information Security
What does the elimination of data redundancy do for a database?
It reduces inconsistency, which is one of the primary problems with redundant information.
What is information redundancy?
The duplication of data or storing the same information in multiple places.
A well designed database should:
- Handle changes quickly and easily
- Provides users with different views
- Have one physical view (physical storage of info. on a storage device)
- Have multiple logical views (how users logically access info. to meet own business needs)
What is information integrity?
Measures the quality of information.
What is an integrity constraint?
rules that ensure the quality of information (i.e. relational integrity constraint & business-critical integrity restraint)
What are some of the security features databases offer?
- Password - provides authentication of the user
- Access level - determines who has access to the different types of information
- Access control - determines types of user access, such as read-only access
What is a data warehouse?
A logical collection of information - gathered from many different operational databases - that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks.
What is the primary purpose of a data warehouse?
To aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes.
What is an ETL?
(Extraction, transformation, and loading) A process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.
