We’ve all been there and some of us are there every day... Who has the latest quarterly numbers? Who has the latest monthly forecast? Which person’s forecast should I use to project year end results? Where can I get last year’s emissions numbers for the same period. Who has the latest plant shutdown schedule?
End-user computing technologies put tremendous power and flexibility on the desktop of each staff member. This combination produces amazing results and creates differentiators and competitive advantages for your company. But who is corralling all that data? When others in the organization need the data, is there an organized way for them to find the information they need? Is it repeatable? Is it efficient? Is the process secure?
Corporate staff today spend hours and hours chasing down the right data or delivering the data in various formats to other departments – emailing files this way and that. It’s not uncommon for one to wonder do I use this value from over here in this file or over therein that file. The easy ability for staff to copy and share files drives the staff problem of “Should I use this file or that file and why?”
Wouldn’t it be nice if data owners had a repository where they could publish data easily from their favorite desktop tool, Excel, and control the sharing of that data? With information intuitively named and easy to access, others in the organization would know that if you want the latest set of “official” numbers, you could pull them anytime into your own Excel workbook or BI tool from the official “Single Source of the Truth”. With good access control only the data owner or their designate can post values to that data location.
At xOverTime we’ve learned that our core value add is to help companies establish a “Single Source of the Truth” system for important data that was previously floating around in unstructured files. Whether emissions or operating data, the challenge is the same: improve the efficiency of data access and the repeatability of getting the right data when needed, while at the same time giving data owners control of their data and who sees it.
Once a “Single Source of Truth” is established, the time savings and efficiencies are substantial. Staff can be confident they are using the most up to date data as the basis for their analysis, eliminating the need to resolve data coming from different sources. The ability to let staff keep using their powerful end-user computing tools lets them evolve important business tools while making the results more efficiently available to others in their organization.