Week 6: Chapter 4

Question 1. What are some of the difficulties in managing data?
Managing data in organisations is difficult for various reasons:1. The amount of data increases with time2. Data are stored in various systems, databases, formats, and languages3. Data security, quality and integrity are often compromised

Question 2. What are the various sources for data?

Data sources can be internal, personal, clickstream and external.

Question 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 field or attribute that has some identifying information, but typically does not identify the file with complete accuracy.

Question 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.

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

Advantages include: greater flexibility in the variety of queries they can make.
Disadvantages: the overall design can be complex and therefore have slow search and access times.

Question 6. What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management is a process that helps organisations identify, select, organize, disseminate, transfer and apply information and expertise that are part of the organisation’s memory and that typically reside within the organization in an unstructured manner.

Question 7. What is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge?
Explicit knowledge deals with more objective, rational and technical knowledge. In an organisation explicit knowledge consists of the policies, procedural guides, reports, products, strategies, goals, core competencies of the enterprise, and the IT infrastructure. In contrast a tactic knowledge is the cumulative store of subjective or experiential learning. In an organisation, tactic knowledge consists of an organisation’s experiences, insights, expertise, know-how, trade secrets, skill sets, understanding and learning.