Can any one help me with this . The following questions are based on chapter 6 o

Question

Can any one help me with this . The following questions are based on chapter 6 of Management Information Systems, 14th Edition. 6-1 Consider the Toronto Globe and Mail case study on page 215-217 of your textbook. · What was the business impact of the Globe and Mail’s data management problems? · What work had to be done by both business and technical staff to make sure that the data Warehouse produced the results envisioned by management? · What specific technologies did the Globe and Mail use to solve their problems?

Below is the case study.

Better Data Management Helps the Toronto Globe and Mail Reach Its Customers

Have you ever received a new subscription offer from a newspaper or magazine to which you already subscribed? In addition to being an annoyance, sending a superfluous offer to customers increases marketing costs. So why is this happening? The answer is probably because of poor data management. The newspaper most likely was unable to match its existing subscriber list, which it maintained in one place, with another file containing its list of marketing prospects.

The Globe and Mail, based in Toronto, Canada, was one of those publications that had these problems. In print for 167 years, it is Canada’s largest newspaper, with a cumulative six-day readership of nearly 3.3 million. The paper has a very ambitious marketing program, viewing every Canadian household that does not already subscribe as a prospect. But it has had trouble housing and managing the data on these prospects.

Running a major newspaper requires managing huge amounts of data, including circulation data, advertising revenue data, marketing prospect and “do not contact” data, and data on logistics and deliveries. Add to that the data required to run any business, including finance and human resources data.

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For many years The Globe and Mail housed much of its data in a mainframe system where the data were not easy to access and analyze. If users needed any information, they had to extract the data from the mainframe and bring it to one of a number of local databases for analysis, including those maintained in Microsoft Access, Foxbase Pro, and Microsoft Excel. This practice created numerous pockets of data maintained in isolated databases for specific purposes but no central repository where the most up-to-date data could be accessed from a single place. With data scattered in so many different systems throughout the company, it was very difficult to cross-reference subscribers with prospects when developing the mailing list for a marketing campaign. There were also security issues: The Globe and Mail collects and stores customer payment information, and housing this confidential data in multiple places makes it more difficult to ensure that proper data security controls are in place.

In 2002, the newspaper began addressing these problems by implementing a SAP enterprise system with a SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse that would contain all of the company’s data from its various data sources in a single location where the data could be easily accessed and analyzed by business users.

The first data to populate the data warehouse was advertising sales data, which is a major source of revenue. In 2007, The Globe and Mail added circulation data to the warehouse, including delivery data details such as how much time is left on a customer’s subscription and data on marketing prospects from third-party sources. Data on prospects were added to the warehouse as well.

With all these data in a single place, the paper can easily match prospect and customer data to avoid targeting existing customers with subscription promotions. It can also match the data to “do not contact” and delivery area data to determine if a newspaper can be delivered or whether a customer should be targeted with a promotion for a digital subscription.

Despite the obvious benefits of the new data warehouse, not all of The Globe and Mail’s business users immediately came on board. People who were used to extracting data from the mainframe system and manipulating it in their own local databases or file continued to do the same thing after the data warehouse went live. They did not understand the concept of a data warehouse or the need to work towards enterprise-wide data management. The Globe and Mail’s management decided to tackle this new problem by educating its users, especially its marketing professionals, with the value of having all the organization’s data in a data warehouse and the tools available for accessing and analyzing these data.

The Globe and Mail’s new data analysis capabilities produced savings from efficiencies and streamlined processes that paid for the investment in one year. Marketing campaigns that previously took two weeks to complete now only take one day. The newspaper can determine its saturation rates in a given area to guide its marketing plans. And there are fewer complaints from subscribers and potential subscribers about being contacted unnecessarily.

To capitalize further on data management and analytics, The Globe and Mail turned to the cloud. A key business goal for the company was to beef up online content and increase the paper’s digital subscriber base. The Globe and Mail devoted more resources to digital online content, with different subscription rates for online-only customers and print customers. To aggressively court digital subscribers, The Globeand Mail had to mine its clickstream data logging user actions on the Web to target potential digital subscribers based not only on their specific interests but also their interests on a particular day. The volume of data was too large to be handled by the company’s conventional Oracle database. The solution was to use SAP HANA ONE in-memory computing software running on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform, which accelerates data analysis and processing by storing data in the computer’s main memory (RAM) rather than on external storage devices. This cloud solution lets The Globe and Mail pay for only what capabilities it uses on an hourly basis.

Sources: www.theglobeandmail.com, accessed March 1, 2014; “The Globe and Mail Uses SAP HANA in the Cloud to row Its Digital Audience,” SAP Insider Profiles, April 1, 2013; and David Hannon, “Spread the News,” SAP Insider Profiles, October-December 2012.

The experience of The Globe and Mail illustrates the importance of data management. Business performance depends on what a firm can or cannot do with its data. The Globe and Mail was a large and thriving business, but both operational efficiency and management decision making were hampered by fragmented data stored in multiple systems that were difficult to access. How businesses store, organize, and manage their data has an enormous impact on organizational effectiveness.

The chapter-opening diagram calls attention to important points raised by this case and this chapter. The Globe and Mail’s business users were maintaining their own local databases because the company’s data were so difficult to access in the newspaper’s traditional mainframe system. Marketing campaigns took much longer than necessary because the required data took so long to assemble. The solution was to consolidate organizational data in an enterprise-wide data warehouse that provided a single source of data for reporting and analysis. The newspaper had to reorganize its data into a standard company-wide format, establish rules, responsibilities, and procedures for accessing and using the data, provide tools for making the data accessible to users for querying and reporting, and educate its users about the benefits of the warehouse.

The data warehouse boosted efficiency by making the Globe’s data easier to locate and assemble for reporting. The data warehouse integrated company data from all of its disparate sources into a single comprehensive database that could be queried directly. The data were reconciled to prevent errors such as contacting existing subscribers with subscription offers. The solution improved customer service while reducing costs. The Globe and Mail increased its ability to quickly analyze vast quantities of data by using SAP HANA running on Amazon’s cloud service.

Explanation / Answer

Q1

The main problems of Globe and Mail’s management are that the subscribers are unable to access the database of the company as because the data which remain in the databases are completely fragmented and it is difficult to access in the multiple systems. The security system has also started to malfunction; it stores the subscriber’s online payment information into its databases. The root cause is the poor data management and in this way, the business impact is also losing its effectiveness to sustain an operational efficiency performance for the subscribers.

Q2

The databases are required to be accessed very properly; the broken or fragmented data needs to be recovered. For querying and reporting purposes the data should be easily accessible to the users, the users will need by the company to educate about the importance of warehouse. The warehouse focuses on making the Globe’s to make easy access to the data. The errors need to be prevented for the all the present customers, in this way better support for customer issues will also make a way out for improving better data management and good business growth.

Q3

The specific technology that has used is SAP HANA ONE, the computer software that can be run on Amazon Web Service within a cloud computing platform. The main advantage is that it will store the data on the RAM which is the main memory of the computer instead of storing in any other external hard drives. As the volume is too large for storing databases on Oracle, the SAP HANA ONE has used which is more convenient to its functions and it has also proven to meet the standard of a good business with its enormous efficiency for customer satisfaction.

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