Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:

So you’ve got your fictional business, and you know a little about the data that you plan to collect. Now it’s time to focus on data and what that means for your organization.

The data that you collect is what will help you understand the inner mechanisms of your organization, and will enable you to be able to fine-tune your business to create operational excellence.

What can operational excellence enable? Some examples below:

Spot sales trends in certain geographic regions so that marketing efforts can be adjusted.
Identify if there are inefficiencies in the supply chain, and make adjustments, and measure/test changes to the operation.
Adjust staffing to account for peak store activity.
Before you can do any of that, you’re going to need to give some thought to the data you are going to collect, and then some more thought to how you want to organize it and use it. 

For this exercise you will be focusing on two components:

1) What your data model is.

2) What privacy issues could surface with the data that is being collected.


Learning Objectives

Define the requirements of a database for a fictional business.
Apply concepts of relational database design for a fictional business.
Explain the database design for a fictional business.
Explain potential applications of collected data.
Explain the role of business analytics in the business decision-making process.
Summarize the competencies of the aforementioned fictional business verbally, and in writing.

Instructions

Step 1: Watch Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) Tutorial - Part 1

Entities - an object, such as a person, place or thing, or event that can be tracked in your database. An entity on Amazon can be a customer, an order, or a product.
Attributes - the various properties or traits.
Step 2: Think about your business. Think about what you can learn about your customers and their interactions with you. Think about what you need to know about your products or services. Think about any events that take place in your business (a transaction, a door opening or closing, etc.).These are your entities. Write all of these down.

Step 3: Now that you know about all of your entities, write down everything that you think you need to know about them. These are your attributes.

Step 4: Navigate to https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/usecase/education and create an account with your student email (@fiu.edu email). You will then get access to a free student account. You can always do this with pen and paper, but it is much easier in lucidchart.

Sample ERD Diagram (A Conceptual Data Model)


Entity Relationship Diagram Example

Step 5: Create a basic entity-relationship diagram for your fictional organization (the example I give above with the cat is pretty basic). Limit yourself to 10 entities max. Do not worry about the cardinality (the way the arrows connect) for your entities. This is not a systems analysis and design course - I just want you to get exposed to this concept so that you can think through what you need to capture with data. 

Step 6: List the primary keys for all of your entities.

Step 7: Imagine you had data populated for all of the entities and attributes you’ve described. What would this tell you?

Step 8: You have all of this data (fictionally), what are you going to do to protect and minimize the invasion of privacy for your customers? Think about your experience when visiting a website. What do most websites have you agree to before you do anything?

Step 9: Submit a reflection statement via the “Activity #2 Reflection Survey” in Canvas about what you think worked well and did not work well with your group. 

What should my submission include?


1) A screenshot of your ERD diagram
2) A list of all of your primary keys
3) A brief fictional scenario on what you can do with your data (2-3 sentences)
4) What you will do to protect and minimize the invasion of privacy for your customers. (2-3 sentences)


I’m only required to ask #4