Information for Decision Making - Report Example

Information for Decision Making Information for Decision Making Executive Summary This report provides information on data management as it is related to organization and its applicability to FirstGroup bus services. The report involves dentition of data management, overview of data management, possible data management options for marketers, and contemporary, legal and ethical issues involved in data management in organizations. As such, it is the responsibility of FirstGroup bus service to make choice of the best data management option and consider the associated cost, ethical and legal issues. Such a consideration will ensure that the firm has the potential of attaining its desired success in business activities. FirstGroup needs a data management system to ensure that its information system lifecycle operates in an effective manner. Introduction Data management depicts the development and execution of policies, architectures, procedures and practices, which are aimed at managing the lifecycle of the information system in order to realize the needs of an organization enterprise (Chen et al. 2008). Data life cycle management (DLM) indicates a policy, which is based on management of the information flow of data in its entire life cycle: from creation to storage to the time such data becomes obsolete and is deleted. As such, there are several vendors who are involved in the provision of DLM based products. However, effective management of data demands that organizations engage in well-thought-out procedures and observe best practices for all the applications to be used. Effective management of data is attained a significant need in the business field with respect to handling clients and increase of compliance regulations. Further, organizations are experiencing large volumes of data, which needs to be managed effectively in order to attain the vision, mission and objectives of a firm (Fulgoni 2013). Hence, adoption of data management strategies contributes in ensuring that organizations are able to handle the fast-growing pool of data, which involves petabytes of information and varied data types. Therefore, FirstGroup bus travel does not have an option rather than engaging in the processes of data management. This is based on the fact that the firm handles large volumes of data, which include the number of clients who need their services (Prenner 2000). Thus, data management by FirstGroup bus travel will assist the management team of the firm in decision making process in terms of knowing areas that need more services and nature of services that are needed. Possible data management options Marketers have an option to choose from several types of database management systems. Databases act as the hidden workhorses of IT systems in organization, which handles business intelligence information and assist in conduct of several transactions daily (Johnson 2013). This has made database to become a current commodity that organization have to seek in order to be able to run their business activities successfully. Both open source and packaged database suites are available, which are provided by several suppliers, such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Hitachi among others. Thus, marketers have an option of choosing Oracle database, which has several versions that include Oracle, 8, Oracle 7, Oracle 10g and Oracle 9i among others. Standard edition of Oracle has database functionality, which supports running of one to four processors. Enterprise edition enables running of more than four processors (Redman 2013). Also in store, is the Express edition, which runs on windows and Database Lite that is able to run in mobile devices. Oracle supports effective establishment of a customer relationship management infrastructure. This aids firms in translating the insights of customers into actionable activities that facilitate in the improvement of customer relationships. Hence, FirstGroup bus service can adopt this data management option in order to ensure that it has the ability and potential to improve on the level of its customer relationship. Such a data management system will also ensure that customers are retained by the firm since they will obtain satisfaction from the delivery of the services by the organization. Another popular database management system is the IBM. IBM has DB2 database, which is regarded as the “data server” and has several suites aimed to be used in a variety of computers that include handled devices and mainframes (Wong et al. 2013). Further, IBM benefits users by enabling them to have licensing arrangements, which makes them not to pay for database features, which they are not in need of using. Current DB2 versions include Enterprise Server Edition, Workgroup Unlimited and Workgroup. However, the most sophisticated is the DB2 Datawarehouse Enterprise Edition (DB2 DWE), which has the ability of handling mixed workload, which include online based transaction processing and business intelligence implementations. Key business intelligence features of DB2 DWE are extraction, data mining, transforming, inline analytics and online analytical processing acceleration. As such, FirstGroup bus service needs to adopt such a data management system, which is able to handle several business activities of the firm without limitations (Vieira da Cunha 2013). Moreover, such data management system will ensure that the firm is not liable to additional licenses for the use of features it does not need. Microsoft SQL server is also a potential option for data management among marketers. It has several versions, which include Standard and Enterprise, Workgroup, Express, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Compact, Mobile and Developer (Ross et al. 2013). This data management system uses modern levels of technology in terms of business intelligence, security and development. Hence, FirstGroup bus service has an opportunity of focusing on using this data management option, which is aimed at attaining the desired success level for the company. Moreover, FirstGroup bus service may focus on using open source alternatives, which are also effective in the support of data management systems in organizations (Tapp 1998). Further, these products tend to improve continuously in terms of scalability and functionality. They include, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres among others. FirstGroup bus service may opt to open source alternatives in case it needs to avoid supplier lock-in and reduce costs of database management. Open source utilizes comprehensive ecosystems, better support and operates at the highest levels (Parsing the benefits: Not all industries are created equal 2011). This implies that FirstGroup will not incur challenges in terms of using this data management system. Contemporary issues in and around data management Scalability is a key issue, which affects the area of data management. FirstGroup should be ready to face such a challenge when it makes a choice of using a given data management system. This is because scalability is highly experienced in several cases of web based services and Internet applications. Such occurs since it is complex to make predictions for the scalability requirements and these requirements can change any time (Revels, & Nussbaumer 2013). Hence, scalability influences how an organization engages in the process of infrastructural investment. Overinvestment implies that the firm is optimistic for growth while underinvestment implies that the firm is ready to add capacity when needed. The landscape of vendors is changing constantly. This depicts a need for organizations to be ready to invest in rapid changes as induced by the vendors of the systems that they are using. This is essential since different versions and different vendors tend to create significant management overhead (Hensley 2014). Thus, FirstGroup has to ensure that it has adequate resources to address issues related to landscape changes on the data management system that is selected. On the same note, FirstGroup has to be prepared on addressing the concept and issue of data recovery. This because data recovery is a common issue, which has influenced how organizations manage data. It is believed that recovering an entire data is easier than recovering a specific data. Hence, FirstGroup bus service should be ready to face such a challenge in the process of data management in its business activities. Data volumes in organizations grow rapidly as the firm expands. FirstGroup bus service is an example of a firm, which is rapidly growing. Thus, the issue of data volumes increment cannot be avoided for this firm. Hence, there is a need for the firm to focus on a database management system, which will ensure that increased volumes of data can be handled effectively in the organization without significant challenges (Davenport 2013). Further, there are few experienced and qualified individuals in the process of data management who are competent in IT. Such indicates that data management may be complex in an organization because of lack of trained individuals. In addition, there are limited resources among labour, which are available for data management. This implies that organizations, which are focused on engaging in the process of data management, have to ensure that they have an access to adequate supply of resources. This is true for FirstGroup bus service. This is because if the firm will not have adequate resources for the entire process of data management, then it is expected that such a process will not occur effectively due to limitation on the required resources for data management. FirstGroup should also be worried about data security. This is critical since several cases of data insecurity for organizations have been reported. Such cases are based on the potential of malicious groups of individuals to distort data, which is stored in an organization for personal gains. This has the negative impact of failure to attain the goal of data management in an organization (Carter & Green 2009). Furthermore, data management is vulnerable to security issues when there is no centralized management system. As such, malicious individuals are able to alter the data, which complicates data management. Such should be a major concern for FirstGroup bus service as it engages in the system of data management for its business activities. Ethical and legal issues associated with the use of customer information Nations have legal codes that have regulations, which formulate the responsibility of common carriers in terms of the protection of customer information and enhancement of the confidentiality of the same. Key legal statements on this area focus on arguing that proprietary information should be explicitly used in the process of service provision and not engagement in marketing activities. Thus, the carriers do not have the ability of information disclosure unless when engaged in the process of service provision. However, when a customer makes a formal request for information disclosure, the carriers have a chance of disclosing such information. 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act also has statutes on regulation of the oral, electronic and wire communications interceptions (Warren 1962). Such regulations are aimed at individual protections against seizure and unlawful search. Thus, FirstGroup should be ready to comply with these legal issues if it wants to be successful in the process of data management in its business activities. Autonomous of the data and ownership of data is a key ethical issue for customer satisfaction (Nunan, & Di Domenico 2013). Thus, firms have to focus on gathering data, which will contribute towards building of customer based services and improving the quality level of service delivery. Such data should have ownership and not data that is gathered from unreliable sources. As such, FirstGroup bus service has a role of ensuring that legal and ethical issues related to data management are adhered to. This will contribute towards attainment of the desired success for the organization. Conclusion FirstGroup bus service needs to adopt an effective data management strategy. Such is essential in order to ensure that message personalization in the organization occurs effectively. This includes information that is collected for utilization in different applications. Nevertheless, as the firm engages in data management, there is a need to make a correct choice for the possible option and take into consideration of the contemporary, ethical and legal issues associated with data management in firms. This will ensure that FirstGroup bus service attains success in conduct of its business activities through the use of the data management system. However, irrespective of the choice that FirstGroup will make regarding the data management system, it is essential to note that cost will be incurred. This is because each of the possible options for the database management has its own cost to be incurred in terms of labour and infrastructure during the initiation of the database. Bibliography Carter, P, & Green, G 2009, Networks of Contextualized Data: A Framework for Cyberinfrastructure Data Management, Communications Of The ACM, 52, 2, pp. 105-109, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 February 2014. Chen, K, Chen, M, & Liu, W 2008, Designing data warehouses for equipment management system with genetic algorithms, International Journal Of Production Research, 46, 21, pp. 6113-6135, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 February 2014. Davenport, TH 2013, Analytics 3.0, Harvard Business Review, 91, 12, pp. 64-72, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 February 2014. 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