SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DATABASE ENVIRONMENT - Database Design and Development: An Essential Guide for IT Professionals - page 83

Orders
Billings
Payments

ACCOUNTING
DEPT.

Corporate
Database
System

CUSTOMER
SERVICE
DEPARTMENT

INVENTORY
DEPT.

Stock
Back orders

MARKETING
DEPT.

Sales
Support

Figure 3-6 Information sharing for customer service.

Among User Levels We considered three responsibility levels of users—opera-
tional, supervisory, and executive. Generally, all users fit into these three broad cat-
egories. Information sharing signifies that data created by one user group are shared
by another group. What is the implication of information sharing among user levels?
Is this sharing different from other sharing schemes?
Information sharing among operational, supervisory, and executive levels tends
to be one-way: Executives make use of data entered by supervisory and operational
levels, and supervisors utilize data stored by operational-level users. Operational-
level users share the data created by them with supervisors and executives,
and supervisors, in turn, share their data with executives. This is because
operational-level users are responsible for entering the bulk of the data in the
enterprise database.
Supervisors perform processes for monitoring and controlling business opera-
tions. For these processes, they need summary data that are derived from the
detailed data created by operational-level users. Special procedures within applica-
tions summarize data in the manner required by supervisory staff.
Executives mostly need very high-level summaries to see how the division as a
whole is performing. Data produced by operational staff must be summarized
further to meet the needs of executives. In addition, executives have their business
analysts working on special projects. These special projects require both summary
and detailed data.

Across Geographic Regions We have noted that in an organization spread
across multiple regions, corporate information may be segmented into global and
local categories. Local information at a region refers to the information restricted
to the business processes at that region. Each region generates its own local infor-
mation. Local information of one region may not be useful to any other region.
What we have reckoned as local information is generally not shared across geo-
graphic regions.
Let us proceed to look at what is considered global information in multiregional
organizations. Customer data is usually part of global information. In a worldwide
company or even a domestic company with many regions, customers residing in one