Remember your friend ‘Bob’, the guy who spent all his time in the high school auto repair class learning how to take apart and rebuild auto engines? You wouldn’t have him design a new car for you, but if your ride was sputtering he might be your first call. Bob learned how to use a specific set of tools and, using those tools, he was really good.

Even though Bob knows car tools very well, he doesn’t know woodworking tools, or plumbing tools or drafting tools. To you and I, all of the tools may look baffling and similar, but they aren’t.

Information Technology is the same, just not as grimy. (more…)

We live in an age in which not having data can be very costly.

It costs money to create and store data. The potential value of that data can only be realized if it can then be used by the right people and systems at the right time.

What is the cost of not having data when needed? It’s difficult to determine a dollar value, but sometimes it can be frighteningly expensive. Bonds traded at the wrong time, allergies not known before medication administered, product not available to ship to your largest customer…
typically only the most obvious data gaps are easily identified and dealt with. Systems like purchasing connected to inventory, or budgeting connected to financials. Many, many, many other data transfers are accomplished daily, but they are often manual, infrequent or one-time. Take your bank account for example: is it automatically connected to your bookkeeping system? Or do you create a download from the bank that you then import into your system? Or do you just manually update? (more…)