How does the use of databases improve or enhance an organization's data collection process?

The use of databases significantly improves an organization's data collection and reporting process in several ways:

Databases provide a framework for organizing, storing, and querying data. By defining data models, tables, and relationships, databases ensure data consistency, integrity, and efficient retrieval. For example, a retail company that uses a database to store and manage its product inventory. The database allows the organization to define a data model that includes tables representing products, suppliers, categories, and other relevant entities. The database ensures that each record in the "Products" table follows the defined structure and data types. This structure prevents the insertion of incorrect or inconsistent data, such as entering a text value in the price column or a negative quantity.

Databases provide a central repository for data that can be accessed by multiple authorized users at the same time. This access ensures that sharing data is always correct and integrity. For example, in a company where different departments have access to the same set of data. Customer data from sales or marketing departments can be loaded into a centralized customer database. This brings bigger customer data that allow better decision-making, analysis, and forecast process of particular teams. Without a database, each team would have its own independent data storage systems, leading to data duplication, inconsistency, and difficulties in data sharing.

Databases offer various security measures to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, manipulation, or loss. Databases allow organizations to implement access controls, which determine who can access and modify specific data within the database. For example,  read-only access will restrict the user's updated actions.

Databases enable advanced data analysis and reporting capabilities. Thank to Database Query Languages, organizations can extract meaningful data for market research, reporting, analysis, or forecasting. It is highly challenging for an organization to run effectively without the use of databases. Without a data storage system, the organization will face many issues related to the delay or correctness of the business process:

Storing data in files which different formats lead to data duplication and inconsistency. This redundancy is the result of data discrepancies, wasted storage space, and hard of maintenance processes.

Without a database system, business processes take more time to complete,  become inefficient and are prone to errors. The absence of a centralized repository for data leads to time-consuming tasks and difficulties in accessing crucial information. For instance, searching for specific data requires manual efforts to navigate through separate data repositories, resulting in delays and increased chances of mistakes. Reporting becomes a chaotic process as data needs to be gathered from multiple sources and consolidated manually, increasing the risk of inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

Organizations rely on data analysis to make informed decisions or forecasting. It would be challenging to analyze efficiently large data without a database. Let thinking about a retail company that has millions of invoices every month. The complex queries or aggregations across these huge data sources would be cumbersome.

Without a database system, ensuring data security becomes a challenging task. Storing sensitive information in unsecured files or spreadsheets exposes the data to unauthorized access and increases the risk of security breaches.

In conclusion, Database Systems bring many benefits to organizations by providing structured data storage, enabling data integration and accessibility, ensuring data security, and facilitating data analysis. Without databases, organizations would face challenges such as data redundancy, inefficiency, limited analysis capabilities, and increased security risks. All in all, the need of a Database in organizations is important for effective data management and decision-making.

Watt, A., & Eng, N. (2014). Chapter 1: Before the advent of database systems. In Database design, 2nd Edition. Opentext. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://opentextbc.ca/dbdesign01/

Watt, A., & Eng, N. (2014). Chapter 2: Fundamental concepts. In Database design, 2nd Edition. Opentext. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.  https://opentextbc.ca/dbdesign01/

Watt, A., & Eng, N. (2014). Chapter 3: Characteristics and benefits of a database.  In Database design, 2nd Edition. Opentext. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://opentextbc.ca/dbdesign01/

Watt, A., & Eng, N. (2014). Chapter 1: Introduction. In Database design, 2nd Edition. https://opentextbc.ca/dbdesign01/