Instruction
Some criteria that you should consider in arriving at your case study are listed below:
1. Your case study may be based on an actual company, or organization, using facts from research, or it may be fictional. In either case, you will have to make a number of assumptions about your case study’s organizational system (principles, policies and frameworks, processes, organizational structures, culture, ethics and behavior, information, services, infrastructure and applications, people, skills, and competencies) to complement the facts from your research.
2. Your case study must require a nontrivial underlying data management capability as an essential part of its operation. Data management must be reasonably complex. One way to determine whether a data management capability is reasonably complex is to think in terms of entities and relationships for your case study’s model. Reasonable data complexity is at least ten entities and ten relationships. You may have to make assumptions to complement your facts.
3. In your research, you may want to think in terms of use cases to define your data needs. Think of use cases as transactions that different end users will invoke when interacting with your case study’s database(s).
4. Finally, you must submit your area of study to the professor via e-mail and have your professor’s approval that you may go ahead with your selection.
Note: you may reuse the same case study topic that you selected in previous courses, such as MIS6000 Principles of Systems Development, or MIS6230 IT Audit, Control, and Compliance.
Week 1 Tasks
Create a report that focuses on the data used to support the operation of your organization in your case study and answer the following questions.
• Conduct a brief, preliminary review of your case study’s organization. This review should include the business mission and the general purpose of data in support of mission-critical information systems.
• Produce detailed data requirements to address the data needs of your organization. The following are criteria that you can use to organize your requirements: adaptability, business and organizational policies, change control demands, compatibility, completeness, consistency, currency, ease of use, evolution, extensibility, functional features, maintainability/manageability, performance, reliability, scalability, security, standards, support, testability, and ubiquity. You will produce requirements in at least five of the above criteria.
• Develop a detailed data model as an EER diagram for your case study. Your model will include entity types with attributes, primary keys, and foreign keys as needed, and pertinent relationships with cardinality and integrity constraints as needed. Your data model will also come with a brief description of each entity type, attribute, and relationship. Make sure to satisfy yourself that your data model is reasonably complex as explained in the guidelines under Background of Enterprise Data: Selecting your Case Study above.