Most of you are not going to be able to remember this, but for me it seems just like yesterday.  All of us in MIS would wait expectantly each week for Computer World to arrive, and we would dive into the want ads just to reassure ourselves that there were companies out there who would gladly hire us for double what we were currently making.  Yeah, we might have to relocate to Saudi Arabia, but who cares.  Just look at those salaries! 

 

There was one other thing that was part of just about every edition of Computer World (and every other IT magazine at that time); an article about the dangers of ‘islands of data’. 

 

You see the year was 1980 and every company in America was getting an IBM something or another, and either building their own MRP II system or else loading a package they had purchased.  And what was the reason for this unprecedented surge in activity?  It was the realization, sometime during the 70’s, that much of the data that actually ran these companies was in private hands.   Sales had their data.  Engineering had theirs.  Finance had a third set.  Companies looked like the Hawaiian Islands of the 18th century, little islands of data, each ruled by their own king and separated from each other by shark infested waters.  Islands of Data.  

 

This was long before PC’s, of course.  Most of the local data was held in card files.  In fact most departments had a big ‘tub’ file that carried the pricing or engineering data that was used on a daily basis.  The tub dated back to the 20’s and was defended by a guardian (usually someone who had been there since the 40’s) who spent all day looking up data and modifying what was on the cards.  The saying used to be ‘if you can still read the card for all the scribbling, then there’s not enough information on it yet’.   But times were changing.  I can still remember the lingering, pungent smell of tear gas as one by one the tub file redoubts were assaulted and taken by the IT shock troops, their data being carried off to the data entry group who would faithfully load it into the new MRP system. 

 

By the end of the decade, most companies felt they had made islands of data a thing of the past.  Their data was united, it was in the MRP system.  Everything had unfolded as IT had foreseen.  Victory was now complete. 

 

And so I was at a client the other day working on a system to track their buy item costs and how that impacted (or didn’t impact) their customer pricing.  In the process we realized that there were very few weights loaded in the Product Master File (which made it hard to calculate an extended material cost for various products at various prices per pound).  When we asked the engineers, all of who have been hired within the last two years, we found out that they kept the weight on a spreadsheet, they don’t load it into the Product Master.  In fact, much of the data they have on the product specifications is kept in spreadsheets, rather than in PRMS.  

 

Nor are they alone.  In the past ten years, everyone has gone spreadsheet crazy and in most companies today there is probably as much or more data on departmental spreadsheets than there is in the real business system.   And there is more data than that on company wide spreadsheets loaded out on the network, spreadsheets that while they may be visible to all users are still invisible to the ERP system.   This isn’t data that is ancillary either, it is mission critical data, being abstracted from the system or entered directly into spreadsheets where it can be changed without the benefit of the protection-ary editing of an ERP system.   In just about every company in America today, these data ‘files’, these ‘islands of data’ are becoming the defacto standard.  

 

What goes around . . . goes around, and around, and around. 

 

Now there are lots of things I don’t know, but one thing I do know is that data that doesn’t interact with the ERP system but which you use to make decisions, is not a good thing.  In fact, it is a very, very bad thing and if you disagree with that I sure as heckfire would like to know your reasoning. 

 

If it were up to me, folks who have this type of data would be singled out.  They could be fined and made to wear silly clothes.  Someone should walk before them crying out ‘Data Hoarder, Data Hoarder’ so that all might bear witness to their humiliation and shame.  Unfortunately, so far, it’s not up to me. 

 

But what really bothers me is I don’t know what will push us to consolidate these ‘islands’.   I mean nobody reads Computer World anymore.  And I’m not sure I can count on companies to do it on their own just because it’s a good idea.   Is it possible that things are really more out of control today than they were in 1981?   I suppose not, but I do know that the more decision data we have outside of the ERP system, the less real control we have over our enterprise.Â