Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Data coordination
•
Data planning
•
Data standards
•
Liaison to systems analysts and programmers
•
Training
•
Arbitration of disputes and usage authorization
•
Documentation and publicity
•
Data's competitive advantage
F IGURE 10.2
The responsibilities of data administration
to keep track of the organization's data including downloading schedules, updating
schedules and responsibilities, and interchanging data with other companies. This
is not to suggest that data administration should try to control all the databases on
all the employees' PCs. That would be impossible. But total data anarchy is not
desirable either, and it is the job of the data administrators to maintain a reasonable
amount of control over the company's data.
Data Planning
Data planning
begins with the determination of what data will be needed for future
company business efforts and what applications will support them. This may be
limited to data generated and used internally within the company. However, today
it often means coordinating with other companies in a supply chain or acquiring
external customer data for use in marketing. In either case, there is the need to
plan for integrating the new data with the company's existing data. A number of
methodologies have been developed to aid in data planning. These methodologies
take into account the business processes that the company performs as part of its
normal operations and add the data needed to support them. While they generally
operate at a high ''strategic'' level and may not get into the details of individual
attributes, they do provide a broad roadmap to work from.
Related to strategic data planning is the matter of what hardware and software
will be needed to support the company's information systems operations in the
future. The questions involved range from such relatively straightforward matters
as how many disk drives will be needed to contain the data to broader issues of
how much processing power will be needed to support the overall IS environment.
Another data planning issue is how metadata and the data dictionary concept
(discussed later in this chapter) should be put to use. This involves what data should
be stored in the data dictionary, to what uses the data dictionary should be put, who
should interact with the data dictionary, and how and on what kind of schedule
all of this should take place. Yet another data planning issue that occasionally
faces companies is the migration of old, pre-database data and applications into the
company's database environment. There is also the problem of migrating data from
one DBMS to another as the company's software infrastructure changes.
Data Standards
In order to reduce errors, improve performance, and enhance the ability of one
IS worker to understand the work done by another, it is important for the data
Search WWH ::
Custom Search