ACCT6001 Accounting Information Systems: Employee Database Application

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the database design for an employee database, starting from an unnormalized ER diagram to a normalized relational database in 3NF. It discusses the importance of database usage over file systems, highlighting features like searching, querying, user access control, and performance analysis. The report includes detailed explanations of IT controls such as access control, data backup, recovery techniques, database integrity, security, and authorization. Furthermore, it addresses ethical, privacy, and security issues related to database management, including email monitoring, keyloggers, firewall usage, user access limitations, data encryption, and copyright protection. The report emphasizes the significance of these measures in ensuring data accuracy, reliability, and security within an organization.

Student ID –
Date -
ACCT6001 Accounting Information Systems
Database Application
Module Tutor -

Report
Introduction
The report is showing the database design of Employee database. After designing the normalized
database, the database will be built in Microsoft Access database. First ER diagram is created in
the report and after that normalized ER Diagram is created to resolve the redundancy.
The report is showing the complete database designing from un normalized database to
normalized database. IT Controls, Ethical, Privacy and Security Issues etc. all are discussed in
the report.
Importance of Database Usage
Database is a very important for every application. To manage the data of any application
database is required. File system can be used for this but file system does not provide all the
necessary features that a relational database system provides. File system does not maintain the
database very efficiently like the relational database system.
A relational database system gives so many facilities over file system like below-
- Searching the database
- Make queries and reports
- Time saver
- User Access control facility
- Performance analysis
- Very useful to the top level management
All the above mentioned features of the relational database system helps in managing the
database accurately and it helps in reducing the fetching time of data from the server that
increases the system performance in a large business.

ER Diagram
The above ER diagram is not normalized ER Diagram. Tables are not in 3 NF. A material may
be sourced from different suppliers. In this case, the information of the material will be repeated
number of times. The same thing will happen in the Employee table. An employee may be
belonged to more than one project. In this case, the employee detail will be repeated number of
times. To resolve this issue, the tables are converted to 3 NF and the normalized ER diagram is
shown below-

Normalized ER Diagram
(Refsnes Data. 2015)
(CS Odessa Corp. 2016)
(Janalta Interactive Inc. 2015)
(Adrienne Watt. n.d.)

IT Controls
IT Control is a procedure that assures that the data is accurate and the company is reliable and a
use can trust on it. Therefore; IT Control is very important for database systems. Following
techniques come under the IT controls-
1. Access Control
2. Backup data techniques
3. Recovery data techniques
4. Database integrity
5. Database security
6. Database authorization
IT controls are very important for data security. It helps in maintaining the database very
efficiently and accurately.
Ethical, Privacy and Security Issues
Ethical Issues
There are so many ethical issues in the organizations like to check the important companies’ data
by administrator for the security concerns. Some of the ethical issues are like below-
- An admin can check the emails of users for security reasons.
- An admin can check the user’s systems of users for security reasons.
- An admin can use key loggers on user’s systems for security reasons.
- An admin can use firewall on network for security reasons.
Security and Privacy
There are lot of security standards and privacy features that can be applied on the company’s
database to secure the database and important information-
- Limit user access control
- Secure the company’s information by controlling the database system features
- Secure the network by antivirus systems
- Secure the important detail by encryption/decryption techniques
- Do not share the customer’s detail
- Secure the copyright information of users

References
Refsnes Data. (2015). SQL Server Data Types for various DBs [online]. Available from:
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_datatypes.asp [Accessed: 2-May-2018]
CS Odessa Corp. (2016). Design elements – ERD (crow’s foot notation) [online]. Available
from: http://www.conceptdraw.com/examples/crowfoot-notation [Accessed: 2-May-
2018]
Janalta Interactive Inc. (2015). Functional Dependency [online]. Available from:
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/19504/functional-dependency [Accessed 2-May
2018].
Adrienne Watt. (n.d.). Chapter 11 Functional Dependencies [online]. Available from:
http://opentextbc.ca/dbdesign/chapter/chapter-11-functional-dependencies/ [Accessed: 2-
May-2018].