WEEK 3: TEAM CASE
ANALYSIS
American Water was initiated in 1886 in United State and
Canada. The headquartered in New Jersey “Voorhees”, American Water Hired more
than 7,000 thousand employees; who responsible for providing water services in
around 35 states. American Water is
depending in a locally-administer utility subsidiaries by the government, and
some business the subsidiaries to the domestic drinking water, wastewater, or
any other service related to water managements.
American Water system until 2006 was very centralized and
localized and almost 80 percent managed manually. American Water established in 2003, the
American Water Military Services Group, this services is work to help in
collecting, treating the wastewater in different military stations American Water has reduced their employees to
6,800 and provide more service to over 47 states and Canada, Ontario. And
provide over a 11 American Water Services Group stations.
Support
American Water’s main objective was to upgrade into a more
centralized operation with a generalized company-wide business process and
overall general reporting. With this goal in mind, American Water chose to work
with SAP as their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system service provider.
American water established information policy, data administration, and
ensuring data quality are up to par in improving data management. Providing
accurate and up to date information via their policies and procedures is the
organization’s rules for organizing, managing, storing, and sharing
information. Data administration is responsible for data planning and for
specific policies and procedures through which data can be managed whenever
needed. Using these business practices, it ensures data quality by eliminating
poor data quality and ensuring data cleansing in that advent of a breach in
their database.
Evaluation
In this chapter, the database management
systems (DBMS) are described. This software allows organizations to centralize
data to effectively manage stored data. The DBMS is an interface between
physical data files and application programs. Each department or end-user would
have a different view or slice of the data pertinent to the work they do
(Laudon & Laudon, p 222). American
Water went through great lengths to migrate their manual data into a single
integrated system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The data
migration entailed not only combining old data with the new system but also
identifying which pieces of data were important to a certain department and who
will essentially “own” specific data and removing data that was not needed
(Laudon & Laudon, p 242).
One issue American Water faced was several
departments were using different names for the same materials. Each region
created their own data systems and found when they merged the data there were
abundant redundancies and inconsistencies. The DBMS identifies redundancies and
inconsistencies and categorizes data into similar values to avoid any further
redundancies. The DBMS assists companies to centralize and manage their data
effectively and securely (Laudon & Laudon, p 222). DBMS also has a data
definition capability that can be built into the data structure using tables.
Each table is defined with specific characteristics that would also be helpful
for American Water to streamline their data definitions which are either
automatic or manual files containing the data element definitions and
characteristics (Laudon & Laudon, p 225).
Another challenge American Water faced was working with
their large vendor database. American Water had over 70,000 vendors listed on
their vendor database. Business users were tasked with identifying which
vendors needed to move over into their new system. Data mining provides insight
into a company’s data. Data mining includes classification, associations,
sequences, clusters, and forecasts. Incorporating a concise list of vendors
helps to narrow down the amount of data needing to be integrating allowing for
“cleaner” more accurate data to be entered into their new system (Laudon &
Laudon p 237).
American Water moved from manually entering
data into Excel spreadsheets into SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence tools.
The SAP Web tools is a set of tools that enables business users to view, sort,
and analyze business intelligence data. Additionally, tools are available for
generating queries, reports, and interactive dashboards (Laudon & Laudon, p
243). DBMS works by processing data from HTML to SQL. The DBMS resides on a
database server which receives the SQL data and provides the data. The internal
server in the company will send information back to the Web server and
displaying on a Web page for the end user. Several advantages in using the Web
to access internal databases are cost efficiency, easier to navigate than
proprietary tools, and the Web interface do not require much changes to the
company’s internal databases (Laudon & Laudon, p 239).
1.Discuss
the role of information policy, data administration, and efforts to ensure data
quality in improving data management at American Water?
2.Describe
roles played by information systems specialists and end users in American
Water’s systems transformation project?
3.Why was
the participation of business users so important? If they didn’t play this
role, what would have happened?
4.How did
implementing a data warehouse help American Water move toward a more
centralized organization?
5. Give
some examples of problems that would have occurred at American Water if its
data were not “clean”?
6.How did
American Water’s data warehouse improve operations and management decision
making?
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