MIS Chapter 6.1–6.2: Data Quality, Databases & Business Intelligence

Data Quality

• Data is everywhere in an organization.

• Employees must be able to obtain and analyze the many different levels, formats, and granularities of organizational data to make decisions. 

• Successfully collecting, compiling, sorting, and analyzing data can provide tremendous insight into how an organization is performing. 

Transactional Data

Encompasses all of the data contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks.

Analytical Data

Encompasses all organizational data, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks.

Data Timeliness

Timeliness is an aspect of data that depends on the situation.

Real-Time Data

Immediate, up-to-date data.

Real-Time System

Provides real-time data in response to requests.

Data inconsistency

Occurs when the same data element has different values.

Data integrity issues

Occur when a system produces incorrect, inconsistent, or duplicate data.

Low Quality Data Example

Customers intentionally enter inaccurate data to protect their privacy.

Potential business effects of low-quality data

Inability to track customers.

Data Steward

Responsible for ensuring data policies and procedures are implemented across an organization.

Data Governance

Refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of company data.

Master Data Management (MDM)

The practice of gathering data and ensuring that it is uniform, accurate, consistent, and complete.

Data Validation

Includes the tests and evaluations used to determine compliance with data governance policies to ensure correctness of data.

Database

Maintains data about various types of objects, events, people, and places.

Database Management Systems (DBMS)

Allow users to create, read, update, and delete data in a relational database.

CRUD

Typical lifecycle of data records: Create, Read, Update, Delete.

Data Element

The smallest or basic unit of data.

Data Model

Logical data structures that detail the relationships among data elements using graphics or pictures.

Metadata

Details about data.

Data Dictionary

Compiles all of the metadata about the data elements in the data model.

Entity

A person, place, thing, transaction, or event about which data is stored.

Attribute

The data elements associated with an entity that distinguish the records from one another.

Record

A collection of related data elements.

Primary Key

A field (or group of fields) that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table.

Foreign Key

A primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table.

Increased Flexibility

A well-designed database should handle changes quickly and easily, provide users with different interface views, have only one physical view, and have multiple logical views.

Scalability

Refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands.

Performance

Measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction.

Data Redundancy

The duplication of data or storing the same data in multiple places.

Data Integrity

Measures the quality of data.

Integrity Constraint

Rules that help ensure the quality of data.

Access Level

Determines who has access to the different types of data.

Access Control

Determines types of user access, such as read-only access.

Business Intelligence

Organizational data is difficult to access and contains structured and unstructured data.

Data Aggregation

Collection of data from various sources for the purpose of data processing.

ETL

Extraction, transformation, and loading; a process that extracts data from databases, transforms it, and loads it into a data warehouse.

Data Mart

Contains a subset of data warehouse data.

Data Cube

The common term for the representation of multidimensional data.

Data Lake

A storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its original format until needed.

Data Cleansing

A process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete data.

Data Visualization

Describes technologies that allow users to visualize data to transform it into a business perspective.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

Track corporate metrics such as critical success factors and key performance indicators.

Distributed Computing

Processes and manages algorithms across many machines in a computing environment.

Ledger

Records classified and summarized transactional data.

Blockchain

A type of distributed ledger consisting of blocks of data that maintain a permanent and tamper-proof record of transactional data.

Proof-of-Work

A requirement to define an expensive computer calculation needed to create a new group of trustless transactions on the blockchain.

Genesis Block

The first block created in the blockchain.

Hash

A function that converts an input of letters and numbers into an encrypted output of a fixed length.

Proof-of-Stake

A way to validate transactions and achieve a distributed consensus.

Blockchain Advantage

Includes immutability, digital trust, and Internet of Things integration.