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Week 07 - Lecture Slides - Part 1

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sisilucia1
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UNSW Business School

School of Information Systems and Technology Management

INFS5978 Accounting Information Systems


Week 07 - Decision Support and Business Intelligence
Managers and Decision Making

Ø Management
• A process by which an organisation achieves its goals through
the use of resources

Ø Decision
• A choice among two or more alternatives made by individuals
and groups
• Diverse in nature and made continuously
• Decision making is a systematic process

1
Structured and Unstructured Problems
Ø Structured problem: One in which an optimal solution can be reached
through a routine series of steps

Ø Unstructured problem: One for which there is no single procedure to


attain an optimal solution
§ May not be enough information
§ May be a large number of potential factors
§ Unstructuredness is closely related to uncertainty

Ø Semistructured problem: one that is neither fully structured nor totally


unstructured
§ Professionals encounter semistructured problems almost daily in
many different industries
§ The goal is to choose the one alternative that will bring about the
best outcome.

2
Why Managers Need IT Support
Ø The number of alternatives to be considered increases constantly

Ø Decisions must be made under time pressure

Ø Decisions are becoming more complex

Ø Decision makers can be situated in different locations, as can the


information they need

3
Fundamental Units of Decision Support

Ø Key terms:
• Data
• Information
• Knowledge

Ø The core drivers of the information age

• Data: elementary descriptions of entities that are recognizable to most


but by themselves do not convey specific meanings – “なるかみの,すこし
とよみて”

• Big data: data sets that are so large and complex it is difficult to
process the data using traditional applications

• Information: data converted as they become attached with a


meaningful and useful context

4
Knowledge

Ø Knowledge: includes the skills, experience and expertise,


coupled with information and intelligence, that creates a
person’s intellectual resources

Ø Knowledge workers: individuals valued for their ability to


interpret and analyse information

5
Big Data

6
Managing Data

Ø High quality data are:


• Accurate – are all the values correct?
• Complete – are there missing values?
• Timely – is the information current?
• Consistent – is aggregate or summary information in agreement
with the more granular information?
• Accessible – is it easy to understand?
• Concise – does it contain too much redundant data?
• Relevant – does the information fit with the decisions to be
made?

Ø Explain and give examples of each of the quality data dimensions.

7 Source: Media Bakery


Data Integrity For example, the attribute of
“Area” of a rectangle could
spilt into its components of
Ø A data deficiency is an “Length” and “Width”
inconformity between
the (1) view of the real-
world system that can be
inferred from a
representing information
system and the (2) view
that can be obtained by
directly observing the
real-world system.

Ø i.e. Data deficiency = (1)


NOT EQUAL (2) Ideal Scenario –
No problem

Isomorphism:
a correspondence that is held to exist
between a mental process (as
perception) and physiological processes

Wand, Y., and Wang, R. Y. “Anchoring Data Quality Dimensions in Ontological Foundations,” Communications of the ACM
8 (39:11), 1996, pp. 86-95
Data Integrity
Ø Incomplete representation
• Situation where one is not able
to make certain decisions.

Ø Ambiguous representation
• Situation where certain
decisions that one makes are
suboptimal.

Ø Meaningless state
• Situation where certain
decisions that one makes are
wrong.

9
The Difficulties of Managing Data
Ø Amount of data is increasing exponentially

Ø Data are scattered throughout organizations and collected by many


individuals using various methods and devices

Ø Data come from many sources

Ø Data degrade over time (outdated data)

Ø Data are subject to data rot (outdated and destroyed storage media)

Ø Data security, quality, and integrity are critical, yet easily jeopardized

Ø Inconsistent, conflicting data due to non-integrated information


systems

Ø Government regulations (Australia’s Privacy Act 1988)

Ø Companies are drowning in unstructured data

10
Data Governance (Policy-Oriented)
Ø Data governance
• An approach to managing information across an entire
organisation

Ø Master data management


• A strategy for data governance
• A process that spans all of an organisation’s business
processes and applications
• Allows companies to store, maintain, exchange, and
synchronise a consistent, accurate, and timely
• “Single version of the truth” for the company’s core master
data
• Master data: A set of core data that covers a complete
enterprise information systems that are important to the
organization VERSUS Transactional data

11
The Database Approach (Technological Oriented)

Ø Databases minimize the following problems:


• Data redundancy: The same data are stored in many places
• Data isolation: Applications cannot access data associated with
other applications
• Data inconsistency: Various copies of the data do not agree

Ø And help maximize:


• Data security: Keeping the organization's data safe from theft,
modification, and/or destruction (Concentration of resources and
efforts in keeping the “one place” secure)
• Data integrity: Data must meet constraints and be reliable
• Data independence: Applications and data are independent of
one another

12
Designing the Database
Data model: A diagram that represents the entities in the database and their relationships

Ø Entity-relationship (ER) modeling


• Entity
o A person, place, thing, or event about which information is maintained
o Entity classes: Groups of entities of a certain type (group of records)
o Entity instance: The representation of a particular entity (a record)
• Attribute
o A particular characteristic or quality of a particular entity
o Primary key (or identifier): A field that uniquely identifies a record
o Secondary keys: Other fields that have some identifying information (e.g.,
major, state)
o Foreign key: Established relationships between tables
• Relationship
o Types: One-to-one, One-to-many, Many-to-many
• Business Rule - Cardinality (At most)
• Business Rule - Modality (At least)

13
Database Management Systems

Ø Database management system (DBMS)


• A set of programs that provides users with tools to add, delete,
access, modify, and analyze data stored in one location

Ø Relational database
• The most popular database architecture

• Widely used by organizational employees

• Examples: Microsoft Access and Oracle

14
A Generic Data Warehouse Environment

Ø Source systems
• Provide data to the warehouse or mart

Ø Data integration (ETL process)


• Utilize IT to Extract data from source systems, Transform it, and
Load it into a warehouse or mart

Ø Storing the data


• Different architectures are available

Ø Metadata (data about the data)


• Needed by both IT professionals and end users

15
Data Warehouse Framework and Views

Figure 3.9

16

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