JCK - A Veteran-Owned Small Business		 EXCELLENCE IN DATA ARCHITECTURE

since 1989

America Support You		 4348 Pine Grove Ave
Fort Gratiot MI USA
48059-3732
V: 810 982-8639
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Business Event Analysis & Modeling (BEAM™)

BEAM™ for Decision Support Systems

Extended Relational Analysis (ERA™)

Structured Query Language (SQL)

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What is User Focused Data Architecture?

Not another computer system!

Relax. Decision support systems aren’t as complicated as transactional systems. In fact, they’re mostly arrangements of your data in ways that are easy to comprehend. These data arrangements, combined with powerful database tools – which you probably already have – enable you to get answers you’ve never had before.

Can’t I just enhance my current system?

Possibly, but there are two things you should understand about transactional systems:

One is that the data they manage is arranged to support their program logic. This is the part of the system you don’t see – where the technicians work. The technicians arrange the data to best support the programs and screens they’re writing. This is what you’d expect, but it means the data is not arranged for easy understanding and querying by non-technicians. This isn’t a deficiency of your transactional system, it’s just how things are.

A second thing is that a transactional system can only track its own data, not the data from another system. Thus your order entry system can’t track your accounting transactions any more than your payroll system can track your warranty claims. This means that if you want answers involving data from several systems, you have to find a way to combine that data into one system.

Sounds complicated – and expensive.

Only if you walk into it blind. JCK has years of experience building decision support systems in many environments. Using our proven BEAM development principles, we can teach your people how to capture the essential business events of your environment, then how to tune those events to build a decision support structure that presents your data in an understandable, query-friendly manner.

We can explain how to crossload data over from your transactional systems, and how to implement a decision support system incrementally – which is how DSS experts recommend it be done – so there’s not a huge up-front operational or financial impact on your organization.

We can show your staff how to use common tools – which they probably already have – to query the data and get the answers you’ve been wishing for.

In other words, you’re just a couple of short classes – and perhaps some consulting – away from being able to build a decision support system that can start answering the questions you’ve been trying to get answered. That’s not so bad, is it?

Besides – how much is it costing you not to have those critical questions answered?
 

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Since 1989, JCK has been devoted to teaching and implementing the principles of User-Focused Data Architecture. UFDA is based on the principle that the users are the data experts in any organization. Sound data architecture should focus on extracting the user's knowledge, clarifying ambiguous defintions, and building understandable data structures. These definitions and structures serve as the basis for system development. The first and most well known UFDA technique is Extended Relational Analysis ™ (ERA), which has been proven for decades. More recent techniques include Business Event Analysis & Modeling ™ (BEAM), which is useful for both Transactional Systems (BEAM TSS) and Decision Support Systems (BEAM DSS).