Database Management

Introduction:

The purpose of the case study is to examine the concepts and ideas that Anthony Ng used to somewhat develop a digital database system. "The Hong Kong architectural industry had derived enormous gains from the unparallel economic success in real estate and stock market speculation"(CABC, 2000).This new economic surge caused much stress to come in contact with the architectural profession This stress was to produce quantity instead of quality designs. This was to meet demands of the rapidly growing society, causing building to be built by the masses. This is not the way "Anthony Ng Architects Ltd" wanted to run their business, it was not the way the corporation did business.

Anthony Ng, was the managing director for "Anthony Ng Architects Ltd". His goal for the company as managing director was to develop a highly advanced EDMS, a paperless office. This paperless office would allow the architects to spend more time on designing, and less on paperwork. His plan was to have "in place an Intranet and a web-based document management system when they moved into the new office"(CABC, 2000). Anthony main goal or primary objective was that this new paperless office will increase his corporation get back to creating quality designs as well as a quality of them. The new paperless office will allow for better communication both outside as well as inside the corporation. Also would allow for the architects to focus on designing instead of paperwork.

A) Change in Communication Patterns:

While Anthony was aware of some of the potential setbacks that are going to show up in the process of changing the style of communication, I feel that he did not cover all the essentials. A very important issue that Anthony may have overlook, called dismemberment. "Dismemberment can be described as the challenge of technological incompatibility"(Sutton, 1996). This can happen frequently in large corporations such as

Anthony Ng Architects Limited, when there are many different departments or divisions communicating together. What happens is that each division needs to make sure that they are all using to same programs to communicate.

If would have been good for Anthony to make sure that the EDMS can overcome this problem of dismemberment, with browsers that allow sharing of all documents independent of the application. This would allow some one who creates a document in "Word Perfect" to share a document with another using "Word".

This is so important to make sure that communication and document information can be shared. "You are aiming for an enterprise document repository that would eventually include all document types under the control of the enterprise, regardless of their physical medium"(Sutton, 1996).

B) The Planning of the Digital System

It the planning of the document engineering system it is important to make a distinction from data engineering. This is due to that "data engineering methods revolve around data models and process models while document engineering revolves around the document model, processing life-cycle, and management subframeworks for managing document objects(Sutton, 1996). It is important to have a good foundation, so that the rest of the EDM system can follow correctly and smooth.

Anthony really missed out in the planning stage. Anthony focused all his efforts on the development of the system, instead of thinking of how to sell his idea to others