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| Case Study High Tech Battles High School Truancy The Boston public school system is charged with monitoring the daily attendance of over 63,000 students throughout its district. And, while daily average attendance sits at a comfortable 92.7 percent, tracking information on the remaining 7.3 percent of the students is a daunting task. Currently, attendance officers working in the field must carry a printout of student records that is about as thick as a 3-inch phone book. The printout contains information including student names, school ID numbers for each student, contact information, names of their schools, and homeroom teachers. Lugging around a printout that’s 3-inches thick doesn’t make much sense in the information age. The field attendance officers are then given a list of students not in attendance on a particular day. Each attendance officer must correlate that list with the information in the printout. Then the attendance officer must perform his or her duties in following up on the student and the reason the student is not in attendance. It’s a time-consuming, but very necessary and important, task. Unfortunately, working with paper-based information only leads to more time spent. So, the Boston public school system in teaming up with AirClic, Inc. to create a wireless truancy system. The system will allow attendance officers in the field to use either cell phones or PDAs to access student attendance information. By simply typing in a student’s name or ID number, an attendance officer can view all of the student’s information and even make updates to a central database. The central database tracks hundreds of pieces of information per student, including a daily attendance record. The estimated cost of the system is very minimal, as both AirClic and Nextel have agreed to donate their time, services, and technology. The real “information age” aspect of this system isn’t necessarily the wireless accessing abilities of cell phones and PDAs. The heart of this system is the central database. Databases are fundamental technologies that help organizations of all kinds today organize and manage information. When information in a database is organized in the most effective way, anyone can easily access it, even with a cell phone or PDA. But, as organizations begin to organize their information in the form of a database, we have new and bigger issues to consider. For example, if all attendance records are located in one electronic database, what’s to stop anyone (including other students) from accessing them? As you might well guess, security then is a key issue. While it’s true someone could steal the 3-inch printout of student information, it’s actually much easier to steal information in electronic form. Not only that, but when someone does steal electronic information, he or she really only takes an electronic copy of it, often leaving no trace that the information has been stolen. You also have to consider who should have access to the information. If you consider a typical business that sells retail products, it might choose to store its payroll information in a database. But should everyone in that business have access to the payroll information? The answer is obviously no. So now, in addition to security, you need to consider the privacy of the information. That is, you have a responsibility to your employees to protect their information privacy. In the case of the Boston public school system, it must ensure that it protects the privacy of its student information, especially since that information can now be accessed by a wireless device such as a cell phone or PDA. As you’ll read in this chapter, organizations do need databases (and data warehouses) for organizing and managing information. But, as we’ve stated all along, the technology itself is often easy to implement. It’s the implementation of security and privacy measures that’s difficult. So, your task is really two-fold in learning this chapter. First, you need to understand how and why organizations use databases and data warehouses to organize and manage information. Again, that’s the relatively easy part. You’ll learn about the structure of databases (in particular, the relational database model) and the software tools within a database management system (DBMS) that help you organize, manage, and access information in a database. You’ll also learn about the structure of a data warehouse and various data mining software tools that help you access the information in a data warehouse. Your second task is the most important. It is one of ensuring the security and privacy of information in a database and/or data warehouse. We can’t give you concrete steps for this task. Each situation is unique and therefore requires unique considerations. Industry Perspective Using a Database to Build a Single View for the Customer According to George Foulke, VP of Information Technology for MetLife, “…if we could get a customer’s entire portfolio online, the customer would view us as a savvy company, the customer’s satisfaction goes up when they see results, and the customer doesn’t have to have human interaction, so our costs are reduced.” As George then goes on to explain, it does in fact cost just a few pennies to serve a customer via the Internet, while it costs several dollars when customers speak with a person on the phone. George is talking about MetLife’s new initiative to create a database environment what will be accessible by customers through the Internet. MetLife sells a variety of products, including banking, investment services, life insurance, and financial planning. Currently, these are not all contained in a single database. That makes it difficult to get one single view of the customer internally. And it makes it impossible for the customer to obtain one single view from the Internet. How successful is your school at creating one single view for you of all your information? Industry Perspective Truckloads of Information in Trucking Aren’t Necessarily Valuable Today, organizations aren’t necessarily starving for data; they’re starving for meaningful information they can quickly extract from their data. Consider Schneider National. Schneider is the largest transportation and logistics company in North America, transporting goods of all kinds by truck, rail, and sea all over the world. A significant portion of its $2.4 billion in annual revenue comes from logistical support it provides to big companies such as Wal-Mart, BASF, General Motors, and Ford. But, as Bill Braddy of Schneider explained it, “We were drowning in data but starving for information.” Here’s an example Bill provided. Suppose an analyst wanted to know why it cost 20 cents per pound to make deliveries to a Ford dealership in Texas but only 17 cents to most other locations. Although the reasons could be numerous, the analyst was forced – because of how Schneider’s information was organized – to choose only at a time to investigate. The analyst then had to write an information request and submit it to a department data engineer. That data engineer then had to write a custom program to extract the information and yet another custom program to format the information into a report, which was eventually e-mailed back to the analyst. The entire process usually took an entire week. And, even if the information wasn’t any good, the analyst tried to use it anyway instead of going through the week-long process of requesting new information. Two problems were very evident at Schneider. First, its information was so disorganized that it literally took a rocket scientist to write the custom programs to extract precise information. Second, businesses shouldn’t need data extraction experts. Businesses should empower all employees and knowledge and technology tools so that they can find whatever information they need. By the way, that’s just what Schneider did by acquiring Cognos, a leading business intelligence software suite. You should check it out at www.cognos.com. Industry Perspective Cracking the Human Genetic Code Years ago, most people thought it would be impossible to crack and understand the human genetic code. Scientists had all the pieces to the human puzzle but analyzing it all could simply not be done by hand. Instead, they turned to information technology for help. Specifically, they chose SAS institute and its enterprise Miner data warehousing tool to support the Human Genome Project (HGP), which is working toward revealing what genetic patterns cause different diseases, with the possible cures to follow. http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/events-news/utmnews.htm |