Chapter 4 - Week 6

Chapter 4 Questions

1. What are some of the difficulties in managing data?

Data is very hard to manage is it is processed in many different stages. Some of the difficulties in manging data include:

• With an increase of time comes an increase in data and since a lot of historical data is kept, over time the amount just builds up making it harder to manage and sort through.
• Data is constantly being developed and updated and every time this occurs you need to upgrade what you have.
• Data security is hard to set up especially for large companies, but can be broken into by hackers and new data security needs to be updated every year,
• Data comes from all over the place, be it both externally ( WWW or Reports) or internally (business data bases) and all this data needs to be sorted as to allow it to be easily accessed for other to use.

2. What are the various sources for data?

The main 3 sources of data include

1. Internal Data be in corporate databases accessed via the intranet
2. Personal Sources such as opinions and experiences
3. External Data such as data from the WWW

3. What is a primary key and a secondary key?

A Primary key is the identifier field or attribute that uniquely identifies a record.

A Secondary key is an identifier or attribute that has some but not all of the identifying information.

4. What is an entity and a relationship?

An Entity is a person, place, thing or event about which information is maintained in a record or file

A Relationship is the linking of tables in order to conduct searches of linking columns and rows of data

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of relational databases?

A Relational database is a database which contains all the records and attributes of entities allowing the user to perform searches via the links between all the tables' rows and columns in the data base.

Advantages include:
-Allows the user to access large amounts of information very quickly and accurately
-Easy to operate and use a database such as ACCESS
-The use of the primary key gives the user great flexibility in the variety of queries made in the database.

Disadvantages include:
-Hard to setup and manage
-If one word is spelt incorrectly the whole database can be out of tune
-If you are new to using the database you may struggle with locating data that you need without the knowledge of using the primary or secondary key.


6. What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management helps with the organisation and manipulation of important knowledge that is part of the organisations memory. This helps the knowledge to be easily exchanged and have the ability to grow.


7. What is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge?

Tacit Knowledge is based on experience , know how, trade secrets and understanding of certain tasks or subjects It is generally slow, imprecise and costly to transfer and highly personnel. How a certain customer reacts to certain sales people is something that is not typically recorded and is an example of Tacit knowledge that is passed on to others verbally.

Explicit Knowledge is more rational, technical and objective thinking, it is mealy knowledge that has been documented. Inn organisations this can be reports, products, strategies and goals. A description on how to do a tax return is an example of Explicit knowledge as it is a documented form of information.