The Information System: An Accountant’s Perspective
Integration Software
Shared Database
Accounting
Marketing
D B M S
Customer Data Sales Invoices Cash Receipts Product Service Schedule Other Entity Data
Product Services:
Obtaining additional private data sets. Users are constrained only by the limitations of the data available to the entity and the legitimacy of their need to access it.
Through data sharing, the following traditional problems associated with the flat-file approach may be overcome: Elimination of data redundancy. Each data element is stored only once, thereby eliminating data redundancy and reducing data collection and storage costs. For example, customer data exists only once, but is shared by accounting, marketing, and product services users. To accomplish this, the data are stored in a generic format that supports multiple users. Single update.
Because each data element exists in only one place, it requires only a single update procedure. This reduces the time and cost of keeping the database current.
Current values. A single change to a database attribute is automatically made available to all users of the attribute. For example, a customer address change is immediately reflected in the marketing and product services views when the billing clerk enters it. Flat-file and early database systems are called traditional systems.
Within this context, the term traditional means that the organization’s information systems applications (its programs) function independently of each other rather than as an integrated whole. Early database management systems were designed to interface directly with existing flat-file programs. Thus when an organization replaced its flat files with a database, it did not have to spend millions of dollars rewriting its existing programs. Indeed, early database applications performed essentially the same independent functions as their flat-file counterparts. Another factor that limited integration was the structured database models of the era.
These models were inflexible and did not permit the degree of data sharing that is found in modern database systems. Whereas some degree of integration was achieved with this type of database, the primary and immediate advantage to the organization was the reduction in data redundancy. True integration, however, would not be possible until the arrival of the relational database model. This flexible database approach permits the design of integrated systems applications capable of supporting the information needs of multiple users from a common set of integrated database tables.