Braley Consulting Services has been
involved in software development and management consulting
for over 40 years. Clients have included IBM, AT&T,
Honeywell and the National Institutes of Health. In
observing the evolution of business practices in over 200
consulting engagements, one thing became increasingly clear
- millions of dollars were being spent on information
technology for the staff but managers are still in the dark
ages. While the quantity and flow of information has
increased dramatically, managers are still trying to locate
typed (electronic or paper) documents and their ability to
do this depends on remembering how or where the documents
were stored - with little or no assistance from the
computer.
Sophisticated document retrieval systems represent one
approach to solving this problem. They start with the
premise that we must work with word processing and other
similar files and a computer can help us search through
those documents. While this is better than no system at
all, the programs are very expensive and marginally helpful
in many cases. Just as a search of the Internet for "ford"
would retrieve a president, an automobile and a theatre,
similar key word searches in a document management program
will generate both false positive and false negative
results.
creating a list is
not the objective -
retrieving, reorganizing
and reformatting the content
is what we need to do
Airlines, banks and other information
intensive businesses don't create entries in a word
processor and then hope a document retrieval system will
find your bank records or flight schedule. Instead they put
the information into a database at the outset because their
objective is to retrieve the information and that is what
databases do.
Spreadsheets are widely used for lists because they are
commonly available and easy to use. The problem with this
approach is again that creating a list is not the objective
- retrieving, reorganizing and reformatting the content is
what we need to do and spreadsheets fail miserably at these
tasks.
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