GRADUATE AND EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS

Module 2: Data and Knowledge Management

Data Management and DBMS

This module will discuss overviews of Database Management Systems, including Relational and On-Line Analytical Processing Systems. A real world example will show managing data for a web site; from online ordering to Pick and Pack. The class will also look at basic Structured Query Language (SQL) statements. The class lab will take a series of flat files and turn them into a database.

Integrating Databases with Spreadsheet Modeling
 

Almost every company spends time retrieving data and placing it into spreadsheets.  This can be a huge waste of time and often a robotic process.  The module will discuss ways to automate this process with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).  A real world corporate example will show how one company retrieves data to help facilitate the management of data from four different reporting methods. The lab will contain a coding exercise to import data in to a spreadsheet.

Data Warehousing/OLAP

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Data Warehousing are decision support technologies.  Their goal is to enable enterprises to gain competitive advantage by exploiting the ever-growing amount of data that is collected and stored in corporate databases and files for better and faster decision-making.  Over the past few years, these technologies have experienced explosive growth, both in the number of products and services offered, and in the extent of coverage in the trade press.  Vendors, including all database companies, are paying increasing attention to all aspects of decision support.

This session provides a roadmap of data warehousing and OLAP technologies, with an emphasis on their new requirements.  We describe back end tools for extracting, cleaning and loading data into a data warehouse; multi-dimensional data models and OLAP operations; front end client tools for querying and data analysis; server extensions for efficient query processing; and tools for metadata management and for managing the warehouse.  We survey the state of the art and mention representative products.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a performance measurement system that helps management gain a fast yet comprehensive view of the organization, as well as translate organizational strategy into every-day operations. Its name signals its objective to balance each of the following:

• Financial measures (e.g., ROI) and non-financial measures (e.g., customer satisfaction)
• The organization’s vision (strategy) and actions taken by individual employees as part of everyday work (operations)
• The needs and role of external stakeholders (e.g., customers) and internal stakeholder (e.g., employees)
• Past performance (outcome measures) and future performance (performance measures)

The BSC derives its value from providing managers with a framework for defining organizational strategy and translating it into operational metrics.  This framework identifies four perspectives from which organizational performance should be assessed. These are the financial, the customer, the internal business process and the innovation and learning perspective. 

The class session on the BSC will include an introduction to the Balanced Scorecard and illustrations of how it has been used in organizations ranging from oil and gas firms, through schools, to hospitals.  In the second half of the class, we will analyze a case study in which the BSC was used.  This case discussion will include the use of hands-on exercises, especially regression analysis, to develop recommendations for strategic decisions that the case company faces.