American Water Case Study

At American Water, the old information systems were separated which made the process of creating a desired output became complicated, because the creating process needs lots of mutual process. In order to solve the problem, American Water was going to integrate the separated systems into a single software platform which will improve the efficiency of information output. So it will have a data migration to transfer data from old systems to new platform.

Information policy:

Information policy establishes the rules for organizations to sharing, acquiring, distributing or classifying information. It governs the procedure and responsibility for users and companies to maintain, distribute and use information (Pasek, 2015).

Roles of information policy at American Water:

1) Establish the rules and standards for data management: Data migration is not just a simple process to transfer all data from old systems to new systems, it should obey the rules and standards in information policy to screen out the useful data.

2) The old data

Improve management decision making:

1) Decision makers can use data warehouse to improve the quality of service by anticipating the behavior of customers. For example, the systems can collect data about the time that people have the largest demand of water, then use these data to provide more water at the time than other time. If there is a shortage of water at the peak time of using water, customers will be unsatisfied, which is not good for the development of company.

2) Customers’ reaction can be received by the company through data warehouse. And the company can make adjustment to react customers’ reaction. For example, sometimes customers may think the water is not clean or sometimes the water supplying is not efficient, decision makers can receive customers’ response immediately and make adjustment according to customer’s