This is the sentence spoken in more small business offices than almost any other. Her name, be it Marge, or as in my experience, “Lucy,” “Anne,” “Ellen,” and “Diane,” means the one person in the office who knows where “that information” is kept.
If you’re not hands on with data management, do not work in a Fortune 500 company, and have been in business for more than twenty years, you probably rely–to some extent–on Marge.
As an industry modeling contractor for McKinsey, I went on-site at many companies to collect data. Usually, a higher-up at the client would tell a senior VP to meet with me. I’d start out enthusiastically, asking what they did and how they did it. Ten or fifteen minutes in, the increasingly uneasy VP would call in “Marge” to answer my questions. Marge was his assistant. She did all the work. She kept all the records. If she was born before 1970, her records were all in ledgers and binders. If the company was big enough, they had a mainframe with legacy custom software that only she knew how to use. For all intents and purposes, the data was inaccessible.
When I was a manager at Yale University Press, it was Annie who had all the answers. If anyone needed any information, Annie knew it. Her memory was astounding, being able to recall titles, authors and editors going back decades. Knowing they wouldn’t be able to rely on her for the rest of time, YUP decided it needed computerized records. They hired a “Developer,” to build a custom mainframe database in 1995. By 1998, when I arrived, the “system” had cost the press more than $300,000, not including ongoing consultation fees, but it simply didn’t work. When the Editorial Director needed some publishing and sales numbers, I asked him where I should pull the data from, he said, “Ask Annie.” But instead of trying to pull up out-of-date information in query form from the maddeningly slow and defective database, Annie gave me a box of stacked MS Word printouts for each book with sales figures neatly hand-penciled on manila folders. I asked her if there wasn’t a better source of this info, and she said “Absolutely not.”
I know my father had relied on a “Marge.” Lucy was in her mid 60s when I started at my family’s business in 2000. She kept records in card catalogs, filing cabinets, chronological notepads, alphabetized or chronologized. She used a computer for word processing. For each new contract, she would copy the boilerplate text, hit “enter” a few times until she came to a new page in Microsoft Word, then paste. The “contracts” file was more than 300 pages long when I first looked at it. Every time I asked a question, the answer was “Ask Lucy.”
Of course, the threat of relying on “Marge” is that if she gets hit by a bus, who’s going to pick up the pieces. Vital information, important processes, key contacts all disappear into thin air. In 2004, Lucy suffered a triple aneurysm and her ability to write and speak was greatly diminished. We couldn’t tell if she was also cognitively impaired, so the business just limped along. During this period of time, I spent many long nights at the office extracting data from her files so that were the worst to happen, we would still know what was going on, and what had happened in the past. Lucy died a year after her aneurysm. If she hadn’t shown me everything about her system, our business activity would have been effectively erased.
Structuring your data in a coherent way is of vital importance to your business. Not just for analysis, but for record keeping, purchase orders, shipping records, sales, and so much more. Even if you’re not ready to employ Robotic Process Automation or AI in your business, how you keep your information may affect ways you can improve your business in the future.