Fishing for Quality
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game requires high-quality information to manage the state's natural resources, specifically to increase fishing yields, while ensuring the future of many species.
Using fish counts, the department makes daily decisions as to which districts will be open or closed to commercial fishing. If the department receives low-quality information from fish counts, then either too many fish escape or too many are caught. Allowing too many salmon to swim upstream could deprive fishermen of their livelihoods. Allowing too many to be caught before they swim upstream to spawn could diminish fish populations-yielding devastating effects for years to come.
Because of the incredible size of Alaskan fisheries, the Commercial Fisheries Division's decisions have global impact. Its information is relied upon by individual fishermen who want to know the best places to fish, by corporations around the world that need information on which to base business strategies for seafood processing and marketing, by researchers, and by legislators. With so much at stake, the Division of Commercial Fisheries set out to improve the quality of its information by implementing a system that can gather the information from remote parts of the state and analyze it quickly to determine the daily outcomes.
Originally, the department captured information in spreadsheets that were e-mailed from station to station before being entered into the system. There was no central information set to work from, and more often than not, the information was low quality. Decisions were based on inaccurate and, because of delays in posting, untimely information. With the implementation of an Oracle database, the department significantly improved the quality and timeliness of its information. Each time a commercial fishing boat within Alaska's jurisdiction unloads at a processing plant, the catch is weighed and details of the catch, such as species caught, weight, and quantity, are recorded on a fish ticket. This information is entered into the new system.
To gather fish escapement information from remote areas, field workers positioned in towers scan rivers to visibly count fish. This information is radioed in the next morning Information from fish processed the previous day is keyed in by 10:00 a.m., and one hour later, the managers and fisheries across the state have all the information they require to make accurate decisions.
They then announce on the radio and on their Web site, which receives more than 3,000 hits on an average day, whether or not fishermen can fish that day. Fisheries are now managed with timely, centralized, and accurate information. Web pages summarize daily catches for certain areas, like Bristol Bay, whose annual sockeye salmon season, which lasts only a few weeks, is closely monitored by fish processors worldwide.
With the enormous quantities of fish caught, salmon fisheries worldwide adjust their production levels based on the results of the annual Bristol Bay sockeye salmon season. This is just one reason why producing fast, quality information is critical to managing Alaska's natural resources
Questions
1. Explain the importance of high-quality information for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
2. Review the five common characteristics of quality information and rank them in order of importance for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
3. How could data warehouses and data marts be used to help the Alaska Department of Fish and Game improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations?
4. What two data marts might the Alaska Department of Fish and Game want to build to help it analyze its operational performance?
5. Do the managers at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game actually have all of the information they require to make an accurate decision?
Explain the statement "it is never possible to have all of the information required to make the best decision possible."