You are the new CIO of a mid-size retailing company, called Teen Fashions, that specializes in clothing for teenagers. The company uses transactional relational databases that were designed several years ago and may not have been designed very well. The CEO of the company, who is your boss, calls you in and explains that he has discovered several problems in the company that have been traced to the company’s data (or the lack thereof.) One problem is that financial data produced by the company’s information systems is often inaccurate. In fact, different financial executives presenting financial figures to the CEO have come up with conflicting figures in the same meeting. Also, the CEO, in talking with the CEOs of other clothing retailers, has found out that they can track their customers’ purchase histories in ways that Teen Fashions can’t. This allows the other companies to use analytics and to do targeted marketing in ways that Teen Fashions can’t. Furthermore, everyone in the company complains that retrieving any of the company’s data tends to be too slow.
Your immediate job is to develop a plan to fix these problems and this plan will be your answer to this question.