Assignment:
Your task for the project is to research in the South University Online Library and the Internet to identify a case study of your choice with a pertinent IT/IS capability with significant data needs, either as an essential asset in support of your case study's business mission or as an integral part of your case study's critical mission.
Some examples could be:
- Healthcare organizations, such as
- Healthcare insurance company
- Major hospital
- Medical laboratory
- Academic institutions, such as
- University or professional institute
- Commerce and transportation center or services, such as
- Major airport or maritime port
- Transportation carriers, such as
- an airline company
- a railroad company
- Network service providers, such as
- Telecommunications service carrier/provider
- Internet and voice digital service provider or Cloud service provider
- Media organizations, such as
- Television network
- Multimedia service operator
- Manufacturing firms, such as
- Computer products manufacturer
- Car manufacturer
- Hardware manufacturer
- Major retailers, such as
- Food retailer
- Home maintenance retailer
- Clothing outlet
- Entertainment complexes, such as
- Hotel
- Vacation resort
- Large recreation and entertainment complex
- Financial institutions, such as
- Banking system
- Credit card service
- Investment trading service
The above are examples to guide you with your research, but you are not limited to these areas. It is important that you arrive at your own case study, based on your personal interests, and one that is well suited to explore from a data management perspective for this course. Some criteria that you should consider in arriving at your case study are listed below:
Your case study may be based on an actual company, or organization, using facts from research, or it may be fictional. In either case, you will have to make a number of assumptions about your case study's organizational system (principles, policies and frameworks, processes, organizational structures, culture, ethics and behavior, information, services, infrastructure and applications, people, skills, and competencies) to complement the facts from your research.
Your case study must require a nontrivial underlying data management capability as an essential part of its operation. The data management must be reasonably complex. One way to determine whether a data management capability is reasonably complex is to think in terms of entities and relationships for your case study's model. A reasonable data complexity is at least ten entities and ten relationships. You may have to make assumptions to complement your facts.
In your research, you may want to think in terms of use cases to define your data needs. Think of use cases as transactions that different end users will invoke when interacting with your case study's database(s).
Finally, you must submit your area of study to the professor via e-mail and have your professor's approval that you may go ahead with your selection.
Note: you may reuse the same case study topic that you selected in previous courses, such as MIS6000 Principles of Systems Development, or MIS6230 IT Audit, Control, and Compliance.
Tasks
Once you have selected your study area and case and have received approval from your professor, you may proceed to the next steps described below. Create a report that focuses on the data used to support the operation of your organization in your case study and answer the following questions.
Conduct a brief, preliminary review of your case study's organization. This review should include business mission and general purpose of data in support of mission-critical information systems.
Produce detailed data requirements to address the data needs of your organization. The following are criteria that you can use to organize your requirements: adaptability, business and organizational policies, change control demands, compatibility, completeness, consistency, currency, ease of use, evolution, extensibility, functional features, maintainability/manageability, performance, reliability, scalability, security, standards, support, testability, and ubiquity. You will produce requirements in at least five of the above criteria.
Develop a detailed data model as an EER diagram for your case study. Your model will include entity types with attributes, primary keys, and foreign keys as needed, and pertinent relationships with cardinality and integrity constraints as needed. Your data model will also come with a brief description for each entity type, attribute and relationship. Make sure to satisfy yourself that your data model is reasonably complex as explained in the guidelines under Background of Enterprise Data: Selecting your Case Study above.
Submission Details:
Create your report in approximately 5 to 7 pages in a Microsoft Word document and name your document.