"To what degree should organizations depend on the analysis of large databases and other IT resources to formulate basic strategy?"
The core of the case for this module involves your careful assessment of the sources of strategic enterprise information. But before you're ready to tackle it, you need to get somewhat up to speed on the underlying issues and dynamics.
Now, one of the hottest trends in current enterprise information systems is what's often referred to as "big data" -- that is, giant databases of stuff gathered from customers (e.g., all the information about your supermarket purchases automatically entered each time you swipe your Von's or Safeway card through the checkout to get all those cool discounts), websurfing, suppliers, internal monitoring, etc. Big Data was first enabled through the enormous increases in the availability of low-cost data storage (down to $30 per terabyte at Fry's Electronics, as of today's paper), but it took the development of good data analytic tools to really spark the trend. Here are two interesting summaries of issues involved in Big Data at the moment: