1. Which of the problems associated with data in database design is the most important to organizations? Explain your choice. 75 words2. Databases require both a physical and conceptual model. Compare

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 1 Cou rse Learning Outcomes for Unit IV Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to: 6. Compare and contrast dat abases and database management. 6.1 Explain the importance of maintaining data for IT professionals in organizations. 6.2 Describe the capabilities of databases and database management in organizations. 6.3 Explain the principle technologies an d their uses when accessing information from databases. Reading Assignment Chapter 6: Foundations of Business Intelligence: Databases and Information Management Unit Lesson Databases and Management What do you think is an organization’s most important asset? Some people might argue that employees are the most important asset for any organization, while others would argue that an organization cannot function without its data. Imagine that an organization loses every server and database in its d ata centers. How would the business know which customers have ordered which products? How would they know what they currently have stocked in their warehouses? How would they know how much they paid for that product or how much they should charge for it go ing forward? How could they operate without any historical records at all? It would be like starting over as a completely new business, would it not? Organizations have to be very protective of their data. As an additional point of complexity, organizatio ns have to follow Sarbanes -Oxley (SOX) laws, which require data to have integrity at a high level. This basically means that no one can touch a company’s data unless they have an expressed need for it and authorization to do so. An organization’s data ca nnot have redundancy. Also, it must be consistent and have integrity. Integrity means that you are ensuring the quality of the data in your database. Integrity deals with the accuracy and reliability of the data. All of this is made possible by relational databases and database management systems (DBMS). Relational databases are designed to store data in a manner that will reduce redundancy and inconsistency. The word reduce is used here because the database engineer, or developer, has to make use of the ru les and tools. Otherwise, there could be issues with bad data. Consider the database as the foundation for business intelligence, data warehousing, and data mining. A DBMS includes the capabilities for organizing, managing, and accessing the data housed in the database (Laudon & Laudon, 2016). Information technology (IT) personnel can use queries and reports for accessing and manipulating that data. The design of the database should be such that it is normalized in order to enforce referential integrity. Data models should be created with relationships between columns in mind. So, how is database data used for decision making? You may have had a database course before, or you may have had to pull data from a database at work. Your response may be just to query the data. However, doing that would just give you some data. How do you get the right data? Let us assume you are trying to make decisions about what items to discount in one of your hundred company gas/markets. It would not be too hard to query the sales data from that store for the past hour. You might get a hundred transactions. What can you do with that information? What if you pull the information for the last week or month? You could get thousands to millions of rows of data. At what point do y ou have too much data t o deal with in your database? UNIT IV STUDY GUIDE Databases, Information Management, and Business Intelligence MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 2 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title Data like this can be summarized as determining your sale of candy bars and that you sell an average of one hundred candy bars per day. But, how does that help you to make a decision about discounting ca ndy bars? What you need is a way to store the magnitudes of data in such a way that it is beneficial to the business. What exactly is business intelligence? Now, go back to our previous example. Not only do you have one store to collect thousands of rows , but you have one hundred stores. There are millions of rows of records that are processed through your operational databases in a given month. You also want to collect data about pricing changes from the vendors and information about marketing trends. Th en, you might want to collect information from external sources like your competitor data or demographic data. How would you store this information? Well, you will store it in a data warehouse. Data warehouses are part of your business intelligence infrastructure. It is through this infrastructure that you can use tools like analytics and data mining to look for pa tterns in your data that you cannot see by just looking at query or report results. The first analytical method is online analytical processing (OLAP), which allows the user to view data in different ways using different dimensions. This is commonly refe rred to as using a data cube. How could this be used for our example? Well, we could pull information on the best -selling candy bar, the average price, the day of the week that we sell the most, and the month of the year. W ould that get us closer to knowin g what kind of discount offers to put in our stores? Yes, but not close enough. The next common analytical method is data mining. Data mining is more complex and looks for hidden patterns and relationships. Again, let’s apply this to our previous example. The results of our data mining could show us the best -selling candy bar, the average price, the day of the week, and the month that we sell the most candy bars. It may also tell us that the majority of the time that people buy candy bars is when they also buy a soda or coffee. Aha! Now, what can our marketing department do with that information? They can bundle products together and advertise them in the store windows and at the gas pumps: “Buy a soda and candy bar and get 50 cents off.” This is a simple example. Just imagine the rows of data that retailers like Amazon.com have stored in databases and data warehouses! Now, there are W eb mining tools that help organizations understand customer’s Internet patterns, including which websites they frequent, w hat they buy, what they do not buy, and how long they spent on the websites. All of this is large data, and it is valuable data. Organizations can make big decisions based on this data. They pay a huge amount of money to store and analyze the data that is collected. As an IT professional, it is your job to protect that data and to help ensure data quality and integrity. There are several concepts, other than the ones previously mentioned, that are also important to this field. The most important involve th e need for organizations to set effective information policies and to have adequate data governance across the enterprise. W e will cover more on these topics in a future lesson. Reference Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information sys tems: Managing the digital firm [VitalSource Bookshelf version] (14th ed.). Retrieved from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9780133898309/ Suggested Reading The following article presents practical information from top financial executives rega rding how they use business intelligence in support of corporate strategies. You are highly encouraged to view this article. In order to access the resource below, you must first log into the myCSU Student Portal and access the Business Source Ultimate da tabase within the CSU Online Library. Morio, J. (2014). Linking business intelligence to strategy. Financial Executive , 30 (4), 66 -69. MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 3 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title Learning Activities (Nong raded) Complete the Management Decision Problem 6 -8 on p. 247 in your textbook. Create a one page summary document addressing the question at the end of the problem. In addition to the textbook, you may use external sources or select sources from the CSU Online l ibrary. Be sure to reference and cite all sources used with proper APA formatting. As this is a non graded activity, this work cannot be uploaded to Blackboard. If you would like your professor’s feedback on your work, send this document to them in an emai l with a note that you would like to receive feedback on your non -graded activity.