Managing Your Data…or Not

If you work with numbers or data for any length of time, I would expect that you would converge on some form of standardization or consistent methodology, but curiously, I often find that is not true. And I’m having a hard time understanding why.

If you are going to enter into the system any type of names such as business units or product, you would want to enter it the same way each time; whether it is the full name or an abbreviated name, you would want it the same every time. But surprisingly, a lot of financial types or accountants do not – the names vary from time to time, almost as if they do not expect to pull out the data ever again.

Why don’t they get it?

If you are going to pull data from the system to track the status, you would try to figure out a way to input data and to extract it in the most efficient way; yet surprisingly, a lot of financial types or accountants do not consider mechanizing their process.

Why don’t they get it?

If you are going to have tables, one for your company and another for competitors, wouldn’t you want those tables to have the same fields, as best as you can? For example, if you are going to have “Date Built” as one of your fields in your competitor tables for products, wouldn’t you want that “Date Built” to be in your company’s product tables rather than sitting in something weird like “Product Tables Embedded”.

Why don’t they get it?

If you are going to track contractors’ hours, wouldn’t you want to see if there is a pattern in your vendor’s invoicing system and to try to utilize that pattern in Excel rather you keying in every contractors’ hours in a spreadsheet?

Why don’t they get it?

In each case there appears to be a serious lack of awareness of organizing the materials, in this case data.