Week 5 Chapter 3 summary

Chapter 3 discussed the aspects of data and management within businesses including: 

Managing data effectively which involves ensuring its accuracy, completeness, accessibility, and relevance while overcoming challenges like exponential growth and scattered sources. 

Data governance strategies, such as master data management, which plays a crucial role in maintaining consistency and timeliness across organisational processes. 

Transitioning from file management to database systems minimises issues like redundancy and inconsistency, ensuring data security and integrity. 

Query languages like SQL facilitate interaction with relational databases, simplifying data retrieval. Data warehouses and data marts organize historical data for decision-making, employing techniques like OLAP for analysis. Maintaining data quality and governance is essential in these structures, along with leveraging knowledge management systems to enhance intra- and inter-firm knowledge exchange. 

From this lesson, what I found that stood out to me was the importance of big data. It has many key uses within companies for example in the case study it was used to gain insights on their customers, allowing for Loyalty NZ to craft better and more personalised offers for their customer base. Big data “will continue [to] get bigger and organisations will have to find ever-more creative solutions to manage it”. (Gray, Issa, Pye, Troshani, & Rainer, 2014) 

Gray, H., Issa, T., Pye, G., Troshani, I., Rainer, K. (2014). Management Information Systems,