Special Event Data in Shared Databases

This article presents special event data for use in database management systems, along with a case study of the collection and representation of such data for an organization. Special event data account for structural changes and pattern interruptions in the time series data of an organization’s performance measures, and are important for the strategic management activities of evaluating management’s past actions and forecasting exogenous variables such as demand for products and services. Most organizations do not have a practice of collecting, storing, or sharing special event data so this valuable resource is lost as employees forget the past or take new jobs. Now that organizations are widely implementing DBMSs, it is possible and important to provide special event data. Data in the hands of individual end user can lead to errors in interpretation and use. Special event data, if they are included in the database, can help to alleviate this problem by sharing knowledge on shard data.