The value of data and the purpose of files in data processing
Introduction
Think for a moment about the different kinds of data that is held by a company. It could include, for example, information about who your customers are, who owes you money, who you owe money to, current orders, information about orders you are trying to win, details about your staff, how much they're paid, meetings that have been arranged and so on. Imagine if it disappeared! What would the consequences be?
Why is data valuable?
Data is valuable for a number of reasons. It takes time to compile, a long time! It takes time to input the data into the computer. To recompile data or re-enter it into a computer is expensive because you have to pay someone to do it, when they could be doing something far more productive for your company. You need information about an order placed with your company so that you can process the order and then be paid for it - that's how your company makes a profit! You need to know when to pay your bills and taxes so that you don't get taken to court. You need to be able to chase up people who haven't paid you so that you can pay your bills and keep trading.
Commercial data is valuable
If you were running a supermarket and you lost the data in your stock control system, you wouldn't know what you had on the shelves. You wouldn't know when you needed to re-order stock and you would lose money while you sorted out the problem. If you kept historical data on your supermarket's computer and you lost that, you would lose valuable information about product trends, what sells well and at what times and doesn’t sell very well, for example. This would have an effect on your business's potential to maximise their profits. If you were in the business of offering loans to people, you would want to be able to check their financial background before you handed over any money to them, in case they had a criminal record for fraud, for example! If credit agencies suddenly lost all of their data, then loan companies wouldn’t be able to ask them about individuals who have applied for loans. Imagine if credit companies lost all of their data! They wouldn’t know who owed them money. If you were in the business of data warehousing or data mining (see later in this section) then losing your data would be catastrophic. Your whole business is based on having historical data to work with! Take this opportunity to review a backup strategy that a company might employ to protect their data. Remind yourself about the need for a written procedure, about what information would go in a procedure and what hardware might be used in a backup regime.
What might cause a company to lose its valuable data?
This could happen in a number of ways, including hardware failure, software failure, losing data because of a virus, hacker, espionage or having the equipment that data was on stolen. Data could be accidently deleted by an employee, or deliberately stolen by them, there might be a natural disaster like an earthquake or a terrorist incident.
The purpose of files in data processing
When you collect together records into a file, with each record holding the same information as other records, you are creating a file structure that is very easy for computers to analyse and manipulate. Programs written for computer systems are very good at doing repetitive tasks quickly, but especially so if everything is organised in the same way. It is a relatively easy task, for example, for a computer program to search through ten million records and then display those that have the surname 'Cooper' if all the records are structured in the same way. If the records weren't structured in the same way, a program could still be written to find 'Cooper' in the records, but it would be a far more complex task and likely to take much longer.