Information Systems in Business - Coursework Example

Information Systems in Business Question 3 i) To build a data warehouse for a ship company, the data can be obtained from the following sources: reservations and cancellations, food and beverage services for the crew members, information about weather condition, unusual events, and onboard schedule, the work and schedule for all crew members. The information we can get from the web is the time in which every crew member is on duty, the weather conditions in the sea and the type of food available in the onboard (lecture week 7, slide 5).ii) The type of decision applications support that can benefit is strategic information.

Because it will make the ship current and historical information about the weather easily available, it will make the ship decision support possible without affecting operation system and lastly, the information will be consistent. Since the company store a lot of information data mining will assist in extracting information from the volume of data in the system without asking specific questions like the food content (week 7, slide 2). iii) One of IBM ECM solution software product is FileNet.

It is a document management engine that brings together enterprise content, security, and storage features with workflow that is ready to be used and it has process management capabilities. Its features include centralized access and better control, delivery of active content in motion, and it can be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint and MS office (http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/filecontmana). One of the Microsoft ECM solution software is SharePoint. It can manage documents, records, and digital assets.

It can control the life cycle of documents in an organization and it can provide content for audio and video (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff602190%28v=office.14%29). Question 4The relationship between business entities are shown by the entity relationship diagram (ERD) and entity relationship model (ERM). When the entities are identified, it will assist the organization to clarify what they are interested in. entities are related in 1:1 (one to one) or 1: M (one to many). This relationship assists in linking up the information during the extraction from different tables in database.

This relationship benefits the organizations in different ways, one is that it makes it easy to understand the picture of the current data, allow data to be independent and enable development of logical design. Entity relationship is made up of four components, namely, entity, attributes of entity, unique identifier, and relationship. Entities are classified into three, tangible, conceptual, and active. In each entity, the data associated with it is called attributes. Entities have a kind of relationship with each other; they are modeled by use of entity relationship model.

The relationship between entities is also called cardinality. Cardinality of a relationship displays the number of times the entity has occurred between relationships (week 2/3). Database has different models, the hierarchical model, Network Model, and Relational Model. The software packages that are found are of relational model. There are three types of databases, multimedia database, object-oriented database, and On-Line database (week 2).