GRADUATE AND EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS
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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.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) can be defined as an organizational problem, e.g., the need to maintain unique organizational competences, as well as a technology based solution, e.g., best practices databases or yellow-pages to locate experts. Increasingly Business Intelligence (BI) technologies are becoming part of the KM infrastructure in organizations.
During the first half of this session, we will define KM and identify key concepts associated with it. Furthermore, we will trace the history of KM, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of different KM solutions, so as to put the new wave of BI-based technologies into perspective. Some of these technological solutions will be demonstrated in class.
In the second half of the class, we will discuss a case study of a real organization implementing a KM solution. This case discussion will focus on the KM problems that the organization faces, the solutions that they are contemplating, and the challenges associated with the KM implementation process. Students will be given the case study and some discussion questions ahead of class time. They are expected to have read the case and to have pondered the discussion questions so that they can actively participate during the class discussion.
