Re: Business justification for Oracle db server?

database_prof wrote:
> Hello! I need to write business justification for Oracle db server
> being installed in our company. We have issue with many small Access,
> Excell spreadsheet data storages, and need to have reliable and up to
> date database of inventory. We also hope to have web front end access
> for users to view and modify that data.
> I vote for Oracle, but will need to write down business justification
> for it before proceeding with using server and installing Oracle.
>
> Can somebody throw good ideas on how and what to put in business
> justification for this case, maybe example of already written
> justification?

It would help to have a lot more information than you have provided but the internal sale needs to rest on more than one foundation. Lets deal with the most important one first: The law.

Assuming your organization is subject to US laws you likely fall under the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or similar. Assuming Sarbanes Oxley, quite frankly, use of MS Access and/or Excel is close to equivalent to breaking the law and puts your c-level managment at risk. Simply put Sarbanes-Oxley requires that all numbers used to make and report financial decisions be auditable. It is absolutely impossible to audit either MS Access or Excel. There is not ability to track, cell-by-cell or field-by-field the origins and history of all changes. By consolidating these non-auditable tools (well toys really) into Oracle you get Fine Grained Access Control, Fine Grained Auditing, etc. all of which provide the ability to backup, audit, and control access to information as required by the law.

The second justification is technical. There are things that can be done in Oracle that are impossible to do in either Access or Excel. And to that can be added scalability and performance. But to make these arguments requires knowing a lot about what is being done and what it is that should be done so I can not help you with them here.

HTH

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)