Data are a vital organizational resource that need to be managed like other important business assets. Today’s e-business enterprises cannot survive or succeed without quality data about their internal operations and external environment.

That’s why organizations and their managers need to practice data resource management, a managerial activity that applies information systems technologies like database management, data warehousing, and other data management tools to the task of managing an organization’s data resources to meet the information needs of their business stakeholders. This chapter will show you the managerial implications of using data resource management technologies and methods to manage an organization’s data assets to meet business information requirements.

Just imagine how difficult it would be to get any information from an information system if data were stored in an unorganized way, or if there was no systematic way to retrieve it. Therefore, in all information systems, data resources must be organized and structured in some logical manner so that they can be accessed easily, processed efficiently, retrieved quickly, and managed effectively. Thus, data structures and access methods ranging from simple to complex have been devised to efficiently organize and access data stored by information systems. In this section, we will explore these concepts, as well as more technical concepts of database management.