Information Flow

Data is the foundation of any information system and needs to be managed throughout its useful life cycle, which converts data to useful information, knowledge, and a basis for decision support. Viewed from the basic profitability or net income model (profit = revenues - expenses), profit increases when employees learn from and use the data to increase revenues, reduce expenses, or both. Data that a company collects is become more of a valuable asset of the company. When a company collects data there should always be a system to organize the data so that the information can be read and understood to become knowledge in order for the company to progress. Once The information becomes knowledge it has to be formatted into a process for which in be used as a graph, spreadsheet, power point, tool kit, etc. so it can be teachable to the rest of the departments. Now that all departments are educated on the new systems i.e. passwords, biometrics and real time analysis the company can start to use this information for real time business. When I say real Tim business I mean things like payroll, schedules, managing company documents, daily reports, sales etc. Now it is very important to understand to decipher which data is important to collect and what data to delete. Right now they have systems that have a first line of defense for the input of relevant data. This system may only let a user input specific information into specific fields that can be fact checked to where there is only one answer such as enter your zip code. This allows for clean data collecting. Data first comes as bits and a bit represents the smallest unit of data a computer can process, which is either a 0 or a 1. A group of eight bits, called a byte, represents a single character, which can be a letter, a number, or a symbol. Characters that are combined to form a word, a group of words, or a complete number constitute a field. Just as related characters can be combined into a field, related fields--such as vendor name, address, and account data--can constitute a record. A collection of related records is called a file or data file. Last but not least, a logical group of related files would constitute a database. Each record in a database needs an attribute (field) to uniquely identify it so that the record can be retrieved, updated, and sorted. This unique identifier field is called the primary key. Records can be arranged in several ways on a data base, sequential file organizations, direct file organizations, and random file organizations. Now as this data is coming into the data base from different sources management of the data bases must be in place in order for a company to compete in today's business world. Database management programs can provide access to all of the data, alleviating many of the problems associated with data file environments. Therefore, data redundancy, data isolation, and data inconsistency are minimized, and data can be shared among data users.