Chris Heaven

I’m continually amazed at the successful businesses I interact with who haven’t embraced digital formats and accessing their data in real time over the network. This topic is somewhat related to my last post on “the curse of knowledge”. I’m immersed in technology every day and I guess I expect other people to also leverage the benefits of being connected to their information.

Storing information in central locations that are accessible by everybody on a team seems natural to many of us, but there are still a lot of medium and small sized businesses who cling to the dead tree format for a significant portion of their operations.

When I see people filling out reports then faxing them to another party only to be entered manually into a standalone system I wonder if the person who owns the business knows how much time could be saved by having the first person enter the data themselves over the network making it immediately available to whoever else needs it. Just think of the reduction in potential data entry mistakes as well.

Paper records aren’t just time consuming and prone to errors – they are an information silo – meaning the information is trapped in a format that isn’t easily shared, or accessed by others. That topic will be the subject of my next post.

Cheers,