Description:

The course is structured to give the delegates continuous opportunity for drill and practice, and to give them immediate feedback on their understanding of each topic.  This is achieved by following each topic with a series of multiple-choice questions, which are immediately discussed as they are answered. 

The answers to the quizzes are not shown to any one else.  Each delegate knows how he/she is progressing, and can therefore ask the right questions. 

This is shown in the flow chart below, where the arrows show the flow of the topics and their quiz's. 
 

 
This cycle is broken about three times during the day to enable the delegates to practice on an assignment, which illustrates the topics.  They work in small groups to do this. 
 

Objectives:

Background

Effective Information Systems can only be produced if those who will manage and use them (the users) play a dominant role in their creation.  

However it is often the case that the users give up this role to the technical staff.  If the users had a basic understanding of the structure of information systems, they would be confident to retain control of their development, regardless of the IS methodology being used to create them.  

Entity Models give a deep understanding of the structure of the business.  Entity Models form such a clear basis for describing the business, that it becomes a simple matter, once users understand them, to specify the screens and reports, which will support them in their business operations. 

Objectives

• To empower staff who are not computer specialists without subjecting them to days of detail training. 
• To give enough insight into Entity Models that the delegates can understand the models being used by their organization, and can interact critically with specialists about their content. 
• To enable the user who has had this training, to understand enough to retain control of systems development projects rather than be tempted to `pass the buck'.  
• To give the user concepts which lead to the ability to understand the business in depth, even when not focussing on computer systems.  

Topics:

The topics sound very `technical'!  Actually these are handled in a common sense business way (the common sense interpretation is shown in italics after each topic).  They are not about the technicalities of computer systems but are concepts that describe the structure of information and enable the people in a business to reach consensus about the meaning of the information they work with. 

• Definitions + Notations for the following: 
• Entity Types (the types of `things' of the business)
• Entity Type Name 
• Unique Identifier (Key) (to differentiate between one business thing and another) 
• Attributes (the details of each thing) 
• Entities of an Entity Type (instances) (the things of each type)
• Tables holding the Entities of Entity Types 
• Unique Identifier (Keys)
• Relationships between Entities (Business things relate to each other. For instance, each product is categorized under one category.) 
• Foreign Keys & Referential Integrity (Each product in a table of products has a reference to its category.  The category details are described in a table of categories. To preserve the integrity of the database, when a category is referenced by a product, that category must exist in the category table.)
• Association / Intersection Entity Types for representing Many to Many relationships (The relationship between some entity types is more complicated than it is between products and their categories.  For instance, each person may work on more than one project and each project has more than one person working on it.  This has to be represented by special Entity Types called Association Entity Types.)
• Composite Keys (Sometimes more than one attribute is needed to differentiate between things of the same type.)
• Normalization.  (Prevention of certain types of corruption in the database.  This is handled in a very pragmatic way through examples.)
• Hierarchies (This and the next concept are often needed in business situations.)
• Networks 
• Generalizations / Specialization's (Supertypes/Subtypes) (This is a basic way of thinking about business concepts or any other concepts.  For instance: each employee is a person;  each manager is an employee; ...  The manager is the subtype of the employee, which is the supertype.)

Audience:

This course is designed for:

• People who are not specialists in computers (typically users in some other function than computers - accounting, marketing, sales, engineering,  ...), but who need to communicate their requirements for computer systems to the specialists who will develop them. 
• People who, once the system has been developed, need the insights to use it intelligently.   
• People who make use of data warehouses to understand their business, and who would therefore benefit from a better appreciation of the semantics of what is in the data warehouse.
• People who would like a deep insight into the business.   

Prerequisites:

No prerequisite is required for this course.  Everything is introduced from scratch.  All words used are defined as they are used.  
 

Duration:

1 long day 

Duration (Days)

Booking Status

Venue

Scheduled Start Date

1 long day

Courses are arranged to fit in with the need. Just notify us of your interest, and we can set the dates together.

South Africa

On Demand 

United Kingdom

Australia

United States

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