Next, she looked at her work. She needed to find a hard copy of a memo she had stored in her filing cabinet the previous week. This memo discussed the fact that the company had just signed a contract with a new customer who owned 55 haircutting salons in the northwest and was planning to start selling the firm's shampoo. Dawn needed to find out who this new client was and create a memo to let it know how to make orders for the shampoo. She pulled out the company’s policy manual to make sure she had all the relevant details about the various options for making orders, the speed at which the company tried to fill such orders, and the various shipping options customers had for receiving orders. Dawn entered some parameters (i.e., location of operations, type of business, month of the year) into the company’s decision support system to determine the probable amount of shampoo the client should order (based on orders made by similar customers).
Identify what forms of data management systems are referred to in the preceding case.
Let us look at each activity Ms. Johnson performs in the case and discuss the data management system involved in it.
Dawn Johnson maintains a to-do list and a personal phone book. These are examples of an individual data management system. This type of data management is not as efficient as a computer-based system in terms of data entry and retrieval.
Ms. Johnson calls up the party supply store and gives her last name and personal phone number and the operator is able to locate information about Ms. Johnson. This is an example of a transaction processing system. Ms. Johnson must have placed an order in the past with the party supply store. The party supply store maintains name, phone number, address, and credit card information about Ms. Johnson so that, when she called up the party supply store again, the store was effortlessly able to retrieve the information.
Ms. Johnson places an order. At this time, the operator asks Ms. Johnson the details of this order and enters it into the system. The operator also confirms with Ms. Johnson whether she would use her home address and credit card number on file. The party supply store minimized data entry and hence the possibility of errors by maintaining information, such as home address and credit card number. This strategy improves accuracy of data. The order was entered into the system. This is an example of a transaction processing system. The party supply store maintained a single view of the customer by properly integrating the customer database and order entry system.
Ms. Johnson finds the hard copy of a memo from her filing cabinet. The data management system in the form of a memo is less shareable and transportable as compared to a computer-based system. A filing cabinet is an example of a personal data management system. As mentioned earlier, this system is less efficient than a computer-based system in terms of data retrieval.
Ms. Johnson uses the company’s system to determine the probable amount of shampoo the client should order. This is an example of a decision support system. This type of system supports managerial decision making by providing models for processing and analyzing data.
| This page is part of the promotional and support
material for Data Management (open edition) by Richard T. Watson For questions and comments please contact the author |