A short time ago there was a busy company where everybody was working hard. Some were marketing, some were selling, some were doing accounts and many were doing other things. Unbeknown to everyone, with all the best intentions, they were creating a little problem, they were gathering information! One day Jane from accounts called David in sales to ask if a job was ready to be invoiced. All she got was Dave’s voice mail. He was away for a week. So, she emailed him with the question. He replied, “I can’t remember, but I have marked it on my Job log. Have a look in there!”. “Where is the job log?” she replied. “Go to my computer, find a folder called ‘Dave’s Live Job’s’ and open a file called ‘Job Logs’ he replied. When she looked at the Job Log she was very impressed. Dave had a spreadsheet in Excel which listed all the jobs with all the clients’ details. She found the job in question but, funny enough after all that, it was not ready to be invoiced. However, she noticed something that from then on would benefit the company and everyone in it. What she found was that the address details of the client was different to the one she had on her client list. To find out which address was correct she went to Amanda in customer services and asked her for the address. “Easy” said Amanda, “I keep all that information in my contacts database in Access”. The problem was Amanda had two records for the same client but also different addresses. Jane took it upon herself to explore the situation further and talked to all her colleagues in different departments. She realised that there were numerous mini databases and various different modules in the company. Some in MS Access, some in Lotus Notes, Some in Excel, a bit in Sage, another bit in MS Outlook, a few in FileMaker and so on. Plus all the label printing and mail shots in Word, diary events in Outlook, emailing setup etc. She wondered if there was a way to streamline all this data, connect them together and make them feed each other.

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