Case Study : American Water Keeps Data Flowing

From Pearson, Management Information System - Managing The Digital Firm, Fourteenth Edition, Page 275 - 276.

Discuss the role of information policy, data administration, and efforts to ensure data quality in improving data management at American Water

information policy helps management put information to the right channel. Data administration make sure all data is managed correctly, efficiently. Data quality is neccessary to keep valid information, eliminating faulty information or redundancy.

Describe roles played by information systems specialist and end users in American Water's systems transformation project

• to help business users transform what they need into information system

Why was the participation of business users so important? If they didn't play this role, what would have happened?

• the business users are the people who know how the business process, but they may not know how it works information system wise. To get optimal benefit of information system, business users will work together with information system specialist to transform what they need.

How did implementing a data warehouse help American Water move toward a more centralized organization?

It is more centralized because the information of a thing is provided only from one source, with standardized/normalized naming. Unlike their previous system, which may have different naming but same information which may mislead the business users.

Give some examples of problems that would have occurred at American Water if its data were not clean?

• data redundancy
• multiple source of truth = conflict
• can mislead decision maker

How did American Water's data warehouse improve operations and management decision making?

With the use of data warehouse, management can use it for (but not limited to) :

• anticipate behaviour
• take proactive action
• use predictive analytic using structured or text data to keep track of customer interaction