Case Study 14

American Water Keeps Data Flowing

    Q1: Discuss the role of information policy, data administration, and efforts to ensure data quality in improving data management at American Water.

    i. Role of information policy

·  To determine the rules and standards that should be followed for storing and managing the data.

·  Developing a database environment requires policies and procedures.

·  The business users are responsible for reviewing all the pieces of data in the old system.

ii. Role of data administration

·  To review all the pieces of data in the old system and remove the data which is not required and duplicated.

·  Responsible for information policies, as well as for data planning, data dictionary development, and monitoring data usage.

·  The data should be reviewed by data administrator to make sure that the data is correct and taking care of the information policies.

iii. Efforts to ensure data quality

·  Identifying and cleaning the incorrect, inaccurate and inconsistent data to ensure the data quality.

·  Managing the data and removing the duplicate data to ensure the data quality

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Q2: Describe roles played by information systems specialists and end users in American Water’s systems transformation project.

With standardised data, reports were easier to generate and gave a more complete picture of operations. It made comparisons among operating units easier and allowed business units to review best practices more easily than before.
Besides, replenishing inventories could be less efficient if more than one data entry per item were used in the database. The database could reflect that a particular item is out of stock based on one data entry while in reality it is in full supply but under a different data entry.

    Management made the business users responsible for the data but not just a responsibility of the information systems department on doing this thing. The business “owns” the data and it is business needs that determine the rules and standards for managing the data.

    Business users were required to inventory and review all the pieces of data in the systems to determine which need to be migrated from the old system to the new system and which would be left behind as they are the one who clear on this as they are the users for the data. Business users were also required to review the data to make sure they were accurate and consistent and redundant data were eliminated.SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence enables business users to view, sort and analyse business intelligence data. It includes generating queries, reports and interactive dashboards.

    Q3: Why was the participation of business users so important? If they didn’t play this role, what would have happened?

    The participation of business users is important because business users are the ones who primarily will use the data, it should be the way they want it and the way it works best for them. Users are the ones who know best what they need and what they want. The business users know what kind of data should be migrated and what should not be.

    Imagine if someone else beside the business users to determine which data to migrate, which data to leave behind, or how the data should be constructed it may simply end up a failure and not meet the business users’ needs and it would cause low work efficiency.

    Q4: How did implementing a data warehouse help American Water move toward a more centralized organization?

    Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system designed to replace disparate systems with a single integrated software platform. Data warehouse allows the company to standardise the data and eliminate the faulty data. All data pertaining to materials used by the company were standardized to make the data warehouse more efficient and to give a consolidated view across all business units. Standardized data gave the company a better picture of how it was performing and easier to be understand instead of messy data which is not standardise and it might cause misunderstanding and issue of low accuracy.

    Q5: Give some examples of problems that would have occurred at American Water if its data were not “clean”?

    If the data are not clean, it makes the data warehouse much larger than necessary. For instance, a particular type of material may have two to three different data descriptions. Comparisons and consolidation of the data are more difficult to make when there is more than one description and definition of each data item. It may confuse the users and cause the issue of low accuracy of data.

    Q6: How did American Water’s data warehouse improve operations and management decision making?

    American Water is focusing on promoting the idea that data must be “clean” to be effective and has poured an incredible amount of effort into its data cleansing work by identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate, and irrelevant pieces of data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the “dirty” data.By having clean data in a single data warehouse that is easily accessible and reports are easy to generate, management and users can make better decisions because the data are more complete. Clean data gives a much better picture of the organization and a clearer direction for management. Data mining is much easier and more complete with clean data. By implementing the data warehouse, the whole company and its subsidiaries were able to standardize their business processes so that they were all entering data in the same way and so the work can be more reliable and creating more values to the company.