Data, an Organisational Asset
Data has always been at the centre of an organisations operations and decision making. Today an organisation depends on data for its very survival. Data is used to make strategic decisions about the future direction an organisation will take and for that
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Data, an Organisational Asset
What the reader will learn: • The rise of the organisation • The evolution of data usage and processing in organisations • Technological change and its impact on data • Data storage, retrieval and analysis—the road to competitive advantage • Data exploitation and privacy
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Introduction
Today an organisation depends on data for its very survival. Data is used to make strategic decisions about the future direction an organisation will take and for that the data must be both current and accurate. Because data is an asset to a company it can be given a value and it can be traded. This chapter will look at data as an organisational asset tracing its importance in recording, analysing and planning as organisations grew and became more sophisticated. The impact of industrialisation on data requirements will be examined and finally with the advent of electronic data storage and processing, the emergence of data as an important component of a company’s assets. Finally there will be a discussion of big data the current issues surrounding privacy when everything that can be recorded is recorded. There are many examples of data being an organisational asset, but we will start with a specific well known example. Amazon, is an on-line retailer which originally sold books. It has now become an organisation dealing with a large variety of goods and services both as the primary seller and as a facilitator for other retailers. Any web user can search for items using key words and can restrict their search in various ways. Once you buy an item from Amazon you can create an account. Amazon uses the information about what you bought (and searched for) to suggest other items you might like to buy. It also cross references this with what other people bought. So if you bought a wireless networking card for your desktop computer, you would also get a list of what other people bought with it. Google is exploiting data in your transaction in real time to influence your shopping decisions. P. Lake, P. Crowther, Concise Guide to Databases, Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5601-7_1, © Springer-Verlag London 2013
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Data, an Organisational Asset
This is an example of how an organisation uses data in an on-line transaction in a real time way. It is the current stage of an evolutionary process of storing, processing and exploiting data which began with the first record keeping.
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In the Beginning
Religious orders and governments were the first large organisations to gather and actively exploit data to raise revenue. Recorded data has been known to exist since at least 2800 BC in ancient Egypt. These included records of the earliest known forms of taxation. Records were held on limestone flakes and papyrus. The Rosetta Stone, famous for holding the key to translating hieroglyphics (the same information was written in three languages on the stone, one of which could be understood and was used to translate the other two) was created to show a temples exemption from taxe
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