Question

Scenario

DoEpicStuff started as a 3 person start-up. Two of these three people wrote code. Each coder would create database tables as needed. There was no naming convention for the database tables or the fields of the table. There was no established process for checking whether the two tables had fields in common and in that case whether they had the same name or the same data type. The coders were free to add columns to (or even drop columns from) each others tables. This caused unexpected code failures.

DoEpicStuff managed to get funding from investors and added more staff very quickly. The new coders would write code that reference tables created by the earlier two employees. Their code often contained bugs because they assumed data that referred to a certain field would contain the same type of data in another field with the same name in a different table. They also acquired some new contracts which required handling sensitive information. The CEO instructed each employee as to what data in which tables they could access, but there was no mechanism for enforcing it.

DoEpicStuff acquired some valuable data repositories from another start-up, BellyUp, that had just gone bankrupt. Data from BellyUp was also referenced in some of the code. But there was no effort made to ascertain the data quality of this data. Indeed, the data collected by DoEpicStuff overlapped with some of the data from BellyUp but no effort was made to determine which of the over-lapping data was more current or which should be trusted. Individual coders decided on a ad-hoc basis whether to use data from BellyUp or from DoEpicStuff.

Some of the coders aggregated data manually from some of the tables and entered them into other tables. But after a while no one could remember where this aggregated data came from. Because of employee turnover it was unclear who had done which part of the aggregation.

The sales and marketing team of DoEpicStuff needed to prepare some marketing material and needed accurate statistics to be included in the marketing material. But they had no one to turn to find out which data was accurate and current.

1. Identify as many problems as possible with how DoEpicStuff manages its data assets, with a one or two sentence explanation of why you think each problem you have identified is a problem.
2. Provide a suggestion for a set of data governance policies that will fix the data management problems you have identified in Step 1. For each policy you recommend, clearly identify the problems it will fix and with a two or three sentence justification for why you think it will fix these problems.

Answer 1

Sol:

Data assets are very important for any company .An efficient and effective database management system is necessory for the organization to go forward.

lets discuss the problems in DoEpicStuff manages its data assets ,

* The absence of following an unique naming convention for table creation.

A unique name for the table is usefull to identify the table in future purpose . The absence of naming convention will create a conflict.

* careless data management by the coders.

when the data is very important there should be takken enough care to manage it . The carelessness created problems in entire coding procedure.

* easy access to add or edit the tables , without any restriction .

This is one major problem , if anyone can remove or edit the table ,its protection becomes more vulnerable.

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we can fix the above mentioned problems by taking necessory steps or policies. lets check what all are that .

* controlled database access :

if the DBMS can be accessed by only admins then the integrity of data will be protected.

* Pre defined set of naming conventions :

documentation of table names will be usefull to avoid the problems of table name conflicts in the future.

* indexing of datas :

an effective indexing will eliminate the struggle to find the correct set of datas .

* module wise assigning work to employees:

if we done like this we can easyly manage and identify where the data came from .