by Ethan Mayers 

     This article was published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

It’s the beginning of another glorious work week. You arrive early at your office in anticipation of what lies ahead. Thirty-two e-mails grace your presence. You have seven orders in the pipeline, and leads on 20 more. Your company is small, but it is finally realizing some of the potential you knew it always had. You glance through the e-mails and stop at e-mail # 17, a question from a concerned customer regarding a previous order.

You sit back in your chair and think about where that information is. You look in the folder where it is supposed to be, but it isn’t there. That’s because you moved it when you did your backup last month. You search your database, but the piece of information is not there. Oversight on your part, perhaps, but a business owner can only do so much.  You retreat to your paper files, but the answer isn’t there either. Finally, you ask one of your associates, who quickly relays an answer from memory. Total elapsed time: 32 minutes.

The successful capture and retrieval of information is paramount to the success of an organization. Without a good process, information gathering can stymie efficiency and drain a great amount of time. Like a commander going into battle, good information prepares us, bad information prepares us badly and no information leaves us unprepared. True synergy comes from capturing enough information to stay on top of your business while not capturing too much that is wasteful and counterproductive.

Businesses collect several types of information throughout any given day. Customer information includes not only meta-data such as addresses and phone numbers but also tastes and trends (e.g., this client likes red pens and prefers to be called only at night). Product information is crucial for a production-based business or retail environment, and service industries can benefit from tracking and usage reports. Employee records are another piece of the information pie, and that data ranges from quantitative (SSN, phone number) to qualitative (reviews).  Detailed information regarding sales leads are necessary to keep the pipeline afloat, and financial information keeps the bills and employees paid. It is no wonder why large firms employ so many people to keep and manage databases.            

In the beginning, most small business owners will use a combination of memory, pen and paper, and a software application system such as Microsoft Excel to keep track of the small amount of relevant information – usually leads. At some point (early for some business, much later for others), the information migrates to a database (Access, Oracle, SAP, SQL, mySQL, etc.). As the business owner, and one who may not have had a lot of experience in the world of databases, it will now be up to you to lead this project. Since every piece of inputted data adds time and complication, it is better to think ahead to conceptualize what kinds of information you will want to look at. Some of it is obvious (lead phone number and e-mail) while others may not be (aging reports, employee productivity levels). In the end, remember that this information serves one of two purposes: to conduct business or to assist in a decision.

Information gathering can be intrusive and time intensive. There are also legal considerations to contend with when capturing and maintaining certain types of personal information. Before your information gathering and retrieval system is built, it may seem, at first, like an enormous amount of time, energy and money poured into a virtual black hole. I’ve had clients who understood the general concept of information retrieval, but were somewhat skeptical of how much time should go into a database project until they saw the piece of paper with a relevant report culled from their own information with useful data that directly guided a business decision.

There are options other than maintaining your database in-house. Companies such as Salesforce.com and outsourcing solutions such as HR intermediaries can handle specific needs, but it is still up to the business owner to understand the flow of information in, within and out of an organization. This process, done right, can successfully lead you through the 21st century business environment. And next time, when you get to that seventeenth email and your customer asks you a question, a few keystrokes and the right query may provide the answer in two minutes for a total time savings of 30 minutes. More time to answer yet more e-mails.