Systems

Systems are a big part of any large organization. Systems are critical to business, so much that if a system fails, employees can be left sitting around waiting for some IT person to come and fix the problem. Businesses and organizations have become so reliant on systems that little to no work is actually done without system involvement.

Obviously I've been working with Systems lately. My theory is that systems are like large filing cabinets or storages rooms...at what point do we get rid of information? Historical data is important, but what historical data serves a purpose? The goal of a corporation is to create wealth for shareholders. How much money is spent in an organization storing data? The square footage paid in lease to store boxes, extra security (Restricted Access) for storage, employing someone to organize the information. Both physical and electronic information needs to be stored and secured.

I was discussing system organization with a System Maintainer. She told me of a Business Analyst who got a document off the intranet -spent 1 month doing an analysis on the data and information to find out that there was a more current edition.

Data is important and critical to making educated business decisions. Therefore data integrity as well as Data organization and labeling are critical. System design is also critical so that you are able to report -pull the required data into reports.

Systems are useful but can cause endless problems -the more "items" you enter into an equation -the more "items" there are to accurately account for and maintain.