Managing Information Systems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Managing Information Systems - Essay Example Data in a Data Warehouse is arranged by subject not by function. As a result a data warehouse provides a peculiar view of the data that is amenable to manipulation for decision support. Levine and Siegel (2003) identify the key elements of a data warehouse as: "They are subject orientated, integrated, time variant, nonvolatile, and contain a collection of both detailed and summary data." The data warehouse can enable a business to solve many problems that can only be diagnosed when someone looks for a pattern in data. For instance, someone can determine problems associated with a product buy analyzing return and repair records. Data warehouse can be used for customer profiling where customer behavior in past promotions can be used to predict results of a planned campaign. A targeted campaign can be launched on a specific set of profiled customers where the anticipated response is expected to be higher. A data warehouse manager is the key person in defining requirements and format of a data warehouse. He or she must ensure at all the time that the data warehouse is meeting a company's strategic objectives. A data warehouse manager leads in specification of new solutions for the business. He or she is in charge of a team of experts that are involved in data warehousing projects. He or she has to ensure that any projects are implemented on time and properly and meet the company's objectives. The data warehouse manager needs to understand the different job responsibility of customers including the user computer skills. It is important that he understands the nature of decisions that need to be supported. In monitoring the system the manager should identify the most effective users of the warehouse. Expand usage of the system within company by identifying non-users of data warehouse and schedule them for appropriate training. The manager must ensure that the user interfaces are user-friendly. Data integrity issues are also the responsibility of the data warehouse manager. It is important to make sure the data in the warehouse is trustworthy. To this end data should be continuously monitored. The manager must search for new data sources and adapt the warehouse to changing data profiles, reporting requirements, and business priorities. The manager must highlight any successful decision made using data warehouse. Finally, "[k]eep your business users, executives, and boss happy". Data warehousing is a dynamic process. The warehouse manager has to ensure that the data is refreshed frequently and no data goes stale. Monitoring of utilization of the warehouse is also important for the data warehouse manager to understand how suitable each of the warehouse solutions is to the business. Being essentially a team leader a data warehouse manager has to supervise a high level team of programmers and database experts. With his or her team the data warehouse manager devises projects such as load processes automation and data modeling. The data warehouse manager must understand high-level business modeling and decision support to assist in development of business solution. Components of a data