Owens Corning Case :: essays research papers

Owens Corning Case 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Data Provisioning OCF conceptualizes the principal IS production activities that produce value for the company as transaction processing, data provisioning, and information delivery. Data provisioning manages the inventory of data and information, using relational database management systems and a data dictionary and data catalog. Transaction processing stores only the current data necessary to provide the status of current operations. Data provisioning receives, stores, and manages all validated transaction data from transaction processing. It also provides data back to transaction processing and information-to-information delivery when requested. Data dictionary and data catalog keep way of what data exists, where it is stored, what it means, and who has authority to access it. That helps data provisioning to protect the data and to provide access to data and information to those who need it. Data provisioning stores the organizational structure regulations in tables in its database, so these regulations can be changed without any difficulties when management decides to modify the organization. OCF created two relational databases to support data provisioning —one to support transaction processing and another to support information delivery. They used for transaction processing technology IBM’s DB2 running on the mainframe, designed to process high transaction volumes fast. For the information delivery technology they used a TERADATA database machine - a combination of hardware and software that is optimized for answering information questions. 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Data warehouse The data warehouse is part of the data provisioning function. It could be described as a big depository. Data warehouse must provide interfaces that accept transaction data from different types of transaction processing systems and move them into the warehouse environment. During this process that data are tested and validated to assure that only high quality data are accepted. On the output side of the data warehouse, there must be interfaces that allow a user to ask for data from the devices (PCs or terminals) that he typically use. The information in the warehouse must be structured, so that users can easily obtain answers to their questions. OCF built data warehouse in 1987. They had selected a combination of IBM’s DB2 relational DBMS, SQL query language, and TERADATA database machine to support the data warehouse. Few months later they built a data warehouse for the Residential and Commercial Insulation Products division that contained product data, sales data, and customer data. After some time they purchased a larger TERADATA machine and related software, which enabled them to expand this data warehouse to serve the other OCF divisions.