Database Reference
In-Depth Information
detail. They require data about an individual customer, a single order, a particular
invoice, a single sale, or seat availability in a specific flight to complete their busi-
ness processes. The organization's database serves this group of users with detailed,
current data.
For supervisory level.
Current data in summarized formats. Supervisory staff needs
information on the overall functioning of their departments. Supervisors require
periodic reports summarizing the data about their departments. They are responsi-
ble for making sure that everything in their departments is done right and on time.
Supervisors monitor the various processes that take place in their departments and
control the way their processes get completed. A supervisor in a sales department
must have weekly and monthly summary reports on the performance of salesper-
sons against targets. If some event happens that is out of the ordinary, the supervi-
sor has to know about it to take corrective action. The organization's database
serves this group with summary data and triggers to alert to exceptional events.
For executive level.
Executives are not concerned with the details of how each
process in every department gets done. They do not need detailed data about every
order, every shipment, or every invoice. Nor do they need summary reports at short,
regular intervals. Most of the information necessary for executives is not routine or
regularly scheduled. Information must enable them to analyze the overall perfor-
mance of each major division and of the organization as a whole. For spotting trends,
planning the organization's direction, and formulating company policies, executives
make use of historical data in addition to current data. The organization's database
serves this group of users with large volumes of past and current data, summarized
as needed in ad hoc fashion.
In Functional Divisions
We have noted a primary method of dividing users into three groups based on their
level of responsibilities. At each responsibility level, users work within functional
divisions. If one of your users is a supervisor, he or she performs the business
processes as part of a specific department. He or she is a supervisor in the account-
ing division, the marketing division, or the product division. Within a major divi-
sion, the user is a supervisor of a single unit, say the order processing department
within the accounting division. The types of business processes differ from division
to division. The information needs, therefore, vary from division to division. Group-
ing users by functional division proves to be a helpful method.
What is the significance of the enterprise database when we group users by func-
tional divisions? How does it serve users in various functional divisions? Although
there are operational level users in all divisions, the types of processes they com-
plete require different categories of data. For example, an operational level user in
the accounting division may create invoices to be mailed out to customers. An oper-
ational level user in the marketing division may compile quarterly sales targets to
be sent to salespersons. An operational level user in the production department may
assemble production flow statistics to be sent to the production manager. All three
users need detailed data from the database. However, what each user needs
from the database varies according to his or her function. Similar differences in
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