图书封面

习题答案

ANSWERS TO END OF SECTIONREVIEW QUESTIONSŸ  Ÿ  Ÿ  Ÿ  Ÿ  Ÿ  

Section 1.1 Review Questions

• How are information systems used at Norfolk Southern to     support decision making?
  

Norfolk Southern has always used a variety of sophisticated systems to runits business. Becoming a scheduled railroad, however, required new systems thatwould first use statistical models to determine the best routes and connectionsto optimize railroad performance, and then apply the models to create the planthat would actually run the railroad operations. These new systems were calledTOP, short for Thoroughbred Operating Plan; TOP was deployed in 2002.

• What type of information is     accessible through the visualization applications?
  

Norfolk Southern built a TOP dashboard application that pulls data from thedata warehouse and then graphically depicts actual performance against the tripplan for both train performance and connection performance. The applicationuses visualization technology so that field managers can more easily interpret thelarge volumes of data (e.g., there were 160,000 weekly connections across thenetwork).

• What type of information support is provided through     accessNS?
  

accessNS allows more than 14,500 usersfrom 8,000 customer organizations to log in and access predefined and customreports about their accounts at any time. Users can access current data, whichis updated hourly, or they can look at data from the past 3 years. accessNSprovides alerting and RSS feed capabilities

• How does Norfolk Southern use the data warehouse     for HR applications?
  

Recently, the HR department needed todetermine where to locate its field offices in order to best meet the needs of Norfolk Southern’s 30,000+employees. By combining employee demographic data (e.g., zip codes) with geospatialdata traditionally used by the Engineering Group, Human Resources was able tovisually map out the employee population density, making it much easier tooptimize services offices locations.

5.    Can the same data warehouse be used for business intelligence andoptimization

applications?

Yes, Norfolk Southern was the first railroad tooffer self-service business intelligence, and its innovation is setting anexample that other railroads have followed.