3. DATA STORAGE
Project Purpose: To review the websites that oer online data storage.
Potential Solution: Students will have fun visiting the dierent websites
to determine which site oers the best solution. They might also nd
4. GATHERING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Project Purpose: To understand the value of data.
Potential Solution: Student answers to this question will vary depending
5. FREE DATA!
Project Purpose: To ensure the students understand the amount of data
available on the Internet.
Potential Solution: Data is the key to starting a new business as they
can review all types of current market information such as growth trends,
6. EXPLAINING RELATIONAL DATABASES
Project Purpose: To ensure the students understand the relational
database model.
Potential Solution: The relational database model stores information in
the form of logically related two-dimensional tables. Entities, attributes,
primary keys, and foreign keys are all fundamental concepts included in
the relational database model. Relational database advantages from a
7. ENTITIES AND ATTRIBUTES
Project Purpose: To apply database knowledge by building entities and
attributes.
Potential Solution: Potential entities and associated attributes can
include:
CUSTOMER, Customer Number, First Name, Last Name, Address,
Phone, Email
8. COMPILING INFORMATION
Project Purpose: To understand the reasons for integrating
information.
Potential Solution: Information levels include individual, department,
and enterprise. Information formats include document, presentation,
spreadsheet, and database. Information granularities include detail,
9. INFORMATION TIMELINESS
Project Purpose: To understand the role frequency plays in a backup or
update strategy.
Potential Solution: Potential answers can include:
Weather tracking system – must update in real-time to be able to track
hurricanes, tornados, etc.
Car dealership inventories – depending on the size and number of
dealerships it could update hourly if there were many dealerships who
shared inventories, or it could update nightly if there were only two
dealerships that kept in close contact
10. IMPROVING INFORMATION QUALITY
Project Purpose: To understand and extrapolate the issues with data
quality.
Potential Solution: An organization must maintain high quality
information in the data warehouse. Information cleansing and scrubbing is
a process that weeds out and xes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or
incomplete information. Low quality information tends to have accuracy,
APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE BUSINESS PROJECTS
Instructor Note: There are few right or wrong answers in the business
world. There are really only e:cient and ine:cient, and eective and
ineective business decisions. If there were always right answers businesses
would never fail. These questions were created to challenge your students to
apply the materials they have learned to real business situations. For this
AYK I: MINING THE DATA WAREHOUSE
Alana will want to look at as many dierent dimensions of information as she
can to begin to determine the issues with selling her product. Dimensions
can include:
Store location
Time of sale
Date of sale
Product location
AYK II: DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS
A relational database contains information in a series of two–dimensional
tables. In a data warehouse and data mart, information is
multidimensional, meaning it contains layers of columns and rows. For this
reason, most data warehouses and data marts are multidimensional
databases. A dimension is a particular attribute of information. Each layer
Data mining is the process of analyzing data to extract information not
oered by the raw data alone. For example, Ruf Strategic Solutions helps
organizations employ statistical approaches within a large data warehouse to
Data mining can also begin at a summary information level (coarse
granularity) and progress through increasing levels of detail (drilling down),
or the reverse (drilling up). To perform data mining, users need data-mining
tools. Data-mining tools use a variety of techniques to nd patterns and
relationships in large volumes of information and infer rules from them that
Student answers to this project will vary. The important part is their
justication for each rating. Sample ratings could include:
Dimension Value (1–5)
Product number 1
Store location 1
Customer net worth 2
Number of sales personnel 2
Customer eating habits 5
Store hours 1
Product cost 2
Customer’s political a:liation5
Local market analysis 3
Order time 2
Customer spending habits 3
Product price 1
Exchange rates 2
Commission policy 3
Manufacturer 3
Tra:c report 5
Customer language 5
Weather 4
Customer gender 3
Local tax information 3
Local cultural demographics 4
Stock market closing 3
Customer religious a:liation 5
Reason for purchase 2
AYK III: UNDERSTANDING SEARCH
Student answers to these questions will vary depending on the students
search preferences. There are a number of companies competing with
AYK IV: PREDICTING NETFLIX
The way that Net%ix analyzes data to gleam information for its customer
recommendation system is simply amazing! First ask your students to
visit the Net%ix site and familiarize themselves with how the site works
and how the recommendations are created. Ask them to backwards
be as follows:
Database: Broadly dened, a database maintains information about
various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people
(employees), and places (warehouses). A database management
system (DBMS) creates, reads, updates, and deletes data in a
inventory such as DVDs including movie genre, rating, year,
producer, type, actor information, etc. Another database would be
for all accounting purposes including billing, payments received, and
Data Warehouses: A data warehouse is a logical collection of
information, gathered from many dierent operational databases,
that supports business analysis activities and decision–making tasks.
The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to combine information,
key idea within data warehousing is to collect information from
multiple systems in a common location that uses a universal
querying tool. This allows operational databases to run where they
are most e:cient for the business, while providing a common
billing, sales, marketing, and inventory.
Data Marts: A data mart contains a subset of data warehouse
information. To distinguish between data warehouses and data
AYK V: The Crunch Factory
This is a great activity to get your students considering global data
requirements. As companies expand abroad the fundamental information
systems that run the business need to be tweaked to handle all kinds of
global dimensions such as dierent currency, taxes such as VAT, laws that
require dierent information for bills or privacy standards, languages and
dierent characteristics, etc.
Challenges associated with low-quality information: An
organization must maintain high quality information in the data
warehouse. Information cleansing and scrubbing is a process that weeds
out and xes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete
Di:culty identifying valuable customers
Inability to identify selling opportunities
Marketing to nonexistent customers
BeneAts associated with high–quality information: Business
decisions are only as good as the quality of the information used to
make them. Data inconsistency occurs when the same data element
has dierent values. Take for example the amount of work that needs to
occur to update a customer who had changed her last name due to
Recommendations on how the company can clean up its data:
To ensure a rm manages its information correctly, it will need special
policies and procedures establishing rules on how the information is
organized, updated, maintained, and accessed. Every rm, large and
small, should create an information policy concerning data governance.
Data governance refers to the overall management of the availability,
usability, integrity, and security of company data. A company that
supports a data governance program has a dened a policy that species
who is accountable for various portions or aspects of the data, including
AYK VI: Too Much of a Good Thing
The primary purpose of data warehouses and data marts are to perform
analytical processing or OLAP. The insights into organizational information
that can be gained from analytical processing are instrumental in setting
strategic directions and goals. Databases contain information in a series of
two-dimensional tables, which means that you can only ever view two
dimensions of information at one time. In a data warehouse and data mart,
information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows. Each
layer in a data warehouse or data mart represents information according to
an additional dimension. Dimensions could include such things as products,
AYK VII: Twitter Buzz
There are so many great websites that share how Twitter works in the
business environment. Here are a few I recommend sharing with your
students:
Twitter in Plain English http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter
How to explain Twitter to your Grandma
http://www.methodshop.com/gadgets/tutorials/twitter-explained/i
ndex.shtml
Kevin Spacey tries to explain Twitter to David Letterman
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/22/video-kevin-spacey-tries-
to-explain-twitter–to-david-letterman/
Social media tools really represent a double-edged sword in the business
environment. If your business isn’t on Twitter or Facebook you will lose out