For those of you who were not able to attend on Thursday, I just wanted to comment on the guest speaker we had who came to visit and talk about how her CIS knowledge proved surprisingly helpful for her career at AMEX.
Despite majoring in CIS as a BBA, she really did not intend to use any of her database knowledge in her career. However, because of the problems of accurately tracking information on the direct sale of their credit cards - she was able to save AMEX from dropping the approach altogether (face-to-face interaction in grocery stores etc. was often the dominant means for acquisition in other countries). She was able to go to Australia and work with designers (writing ER diagrams in her hotel room) so that they could implement a database system that could accurately track the direct-selling approach. This allowed the channel to be managed more effectively. At the completion of the project, the database she designed was AMEX's most simple and cost-efficient database to date.
It was really cool to see how important database design is for an organization and how there are huge implications and potential opportunities for having this knowledge on hand. I'm sure we'll have the opportunity to apply what we're learning sometime soon in the future (we better, since at this pace our current knowledge will become obsolete quite soon)
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