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The Role of Data Management Technologies in Achieving Organizational Efficiencies

8 September, 2015 - 12:22

One of the most important benefits that information systems provide to organizations is the ability to manage data at rates and quantities that far exceed human abilities. As computerization of organizations has evolved so too has the ability of organizations to manage ever more complex and numerous tasks. Consider the following realities:

  • postal and courier services: The Universal Postal Union (UPU) estimates that in 2006 the number of “domestic letter-post” items delivered in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States was 17,591,462,361 [UPU2007]. The courier service FEDEX reported that between 2005 and 2008 it handled an average of 3,476,000 packages per day, including an average of 496,000 packages per day for international delivery. To facilitate these deliveries it coordinates a worldwide system of over 600 aircraft, 40,000 motorized vehicles, 1,400 stations, and 140,000 employees respectively [FEDEX2007a ; FEDEX2007b].
  • air travel: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported that in 2006 the number of passengers who boarded airplanes in the U.S. was 716,818,000 [FAA2006].
  • health care: As part of its mandate the World Health Organization (WHO) collects and reports on statistical information on over 150 health indicators for 193 countries [WHO 2007].
  • telephone services: The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that by August 2007 there would be 3 billion mobile telephone subscribers in the world . African countries accounted for an estimated 198 million mobile telephone subscribers in 2006 alone [ITU2007].
  • banking services: It is now common for a bank to manage several million individual accounts for customers and provide access to their services via hundreds of branch offices and automated teller machines.
  • library services: The U.S. Library of Congress began with 3,000 items. Its collection now comprises over 134 million items with 10,000 new additions daily [LoC2007].

Organizations in most of these sectors operated prior to the development of computerized data management systems. Posted letters were once sorted, routed, and delivered to letter carriers by hand. Airlines once processed reservations and handled baggage without computers. Telephone calls were once set up by hand without access to an electronic number database and after that calls were established mechanically based on detecting the numbers that a caller dialed. Libraries and banks also managed their customer services without the benefit of computerization. Humans' abilities to manage these endeavors has limits, however. These operations could not have scaled to the sizes they are now without automation.

To be more specific, none of these situations would be possible without powerful data management technologies. The services delivered in each type of organization described above necessitates the storage, processing, and tracking of millions of data items. Further complicating this is the fact that most data items have critical relationships with other data items which must also be maintained reliably. Data about an airline passenger, for example, represents not only their identify, but the flights on which they're booked, payment information for their tickets, and information about the baggage they've checked before boarding their flight. By implication an airline passenger's reservation also represents changes to the current inventories of available seats on each the aircraft they will be flying. Make one error in any one of these areas of data management and a passenger may find themselves in the wrong city without their luggage; an airline may accidentally book multiple passengers for the same seat or conversely fail to realize that they still have seats available to sell. Proper data management allows organizations to perform well in the face of complexity and volume.

As the reader realizes by now the phrase “data management” means far more than performing numeric calculations which are the stereotypic duties of computers. The basic responsibilities that data management technologies have are more far reaching. They include:

  • data models: mechanisms that allow clients to specify what data are to be managed including the logical relationships amongst them and constraints which must hold
  • storage management: providing mechanisms for storing data in a logically coherent and space efficient manner
  • access methods: providing mechanisms for locating desired data amongst a very large collection of data and retrieving them efficiently
  • query processing and data manipulation: providing mechanisms that allow clients – people or software – to create, examine, change, and delete data in a convenient manner
  • security: providing mechanisms for making data secure from unwanted accesses
  • transaction processing: providing mechanisms which allow multiple clients to simultaneously examine and change data without destroying its logical coherence
  • application program interface: providing a mechanism by which other software systems can make use of the data management system

Correctly designed and operated data management technologies allow systems such as those described above to run reliably and efficiently. Data management technologies are used most often in conjunction with other technologies. Well-designed data management technologies combined with other technologies such as barcodes and optical scanners allow courier services and airlines to track packages and luggage and ensure that they are delivered to their proper destinations. Effective data management technologies combined with switching devices – themselves computers -- allow mobile telephone service providers to route high volumes of calls to the proper phones and to associate text messages and voice mail with the correct recipients. Libraries are now better able to keep track of their massive holdings and to maintain an accurate accounting of which borrowers have which items. Likewise banks are better able to keep track of their customers' accounts and the transactions that take place against them.