Catch a wave

Collaboration is essential in today's lean business model. Every business collaborates its use of data throughout. The business relationship with its data makes or breaks the business. Data should be viewed as an entity with which business processes can talk to, talk about, and recognize the life it takes on. You cannot have a business without data.

So where am I going with this? Google announced a new product called Wave. This product looks to be a collaboration of the services Gmail and Docs. Other services Google may combine with Wave are instant messaging and real time searching. Wave will have a mobile component that will further blurr the line between computer device and mobile device.

The future is getting smaller. Google seems to realize more than other vendors that staying ahead of the curve is essential to survival. Always innovating, always looking to the future and able to quantify what that future will be, at least in the short term, is arguably Google's strength. Development in any organization should keep Google visions in front of their own.... until they surpass Google that is :)

Multi-Value returns in Access

There are times when you write a function and want to return more than one value. Using VBA in Access you can declare a user defined type that has multiple types within its structure.

Public Type UserType1
Fld1 as integer
Fld2 as string
Fld3 as date
End Type

Function TestAType() as UserType1
TestAType.Fld1 = 1
TestAType.Fld2 = "This is field 2"
TestAType.Fld3 = #2/1/2009#
End Function

You can then reference the value you need in another part of the program.

MyIntegerValue = TestAType().Fld1

Happy Holidays!

It is that time of year and people are making whatever plans they make to enjoy whatever celebration they celebrate. It can be very joyous time of year. There are many times of year I am reminded how lucky I am to live where I live and have the friends and family that I have. I hope everyone can feel something good and I hope the goodness would last all year long. Everyone goes through some sort of heartache in their lives, I just hope that there is something that can help them through the tough times and that too have good friends and family to lean on.

The world is going through some tough times right now. There are money, conflict, and family issues with which many of us are feeling the pain. It is my wish that all the pain would go away and that everyone could feel not hungry, happy, and safe. I know that is a tall wish, but in my little corner of the earth I will make some donation, help someone in need and try to make someone laugh at least once. I will try. That is all I can do. I hope you try too.

Happy holidays to you! I hope you have a good year, that you live long and prosper!

Your Best Friend

In these uncertain times organizations are moving into a cycle of trimming costs and maximizing efficiencies. Increase profit margins are going to come from improved processes and leaning out the company. We are in a recession and sales are going to be very hard to come bye. The one bright spot might be from government help.

Automation and improvements in you business processes through technology is a wise expenditure. It is always a wise expenditure, but in these times it is more pronounced because it might be the best way to improve your services to your clients.

Look at ways you can leverage your current assets and integrate these processes. The less the employee has to do the more they can do. The more the employee has to do, the less the rest of the organization knows about the process.

Call on your automation guru, your software consultant, your business process automation specialist, they will be your best friend helping you increase your services to your clients and the bottom line of your organization.

You might be breaking the law

The No Electronic Theft act makes it a crime to send any copyrighted material to someone or somewhere else. In effect, if you copy a picture from a copyrighted web site or software without permission, you are committing a crime. It was designed more for trying to catch people who copy DVDs or music and redistribute them. But some corporations, like the music industry companies, are using this law with zeal. Music companies have sued and won decisions against individuals for copying music.

HR4279 imposes stricter penalties for infringement. Law enforcement can actual seize property of suspected inf ringers. This law is akin to the drug enforcement laws that let law enforcement seize cars, houses, cash, computers, or any other property of suspected drug dealer. Sometimes these people do not get their property back even after they are proven Innocent or even if no charges are officially filed.

Then there is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. This act makes it a crime to circumvent any copy protection. It does not matter if you do nothing else but break the copy protection. Also, this act makes it a crime to have in your possession any copy protection breaking tools. Just having these tools is a crime.

So watch out for those music downloads and reuse of those pictures from YouTube. If they find their way onto your organization's network, your network might be found in a different physical location and you might be looking out from behind bars. A little drastic I know and probably will not happen to you, but there have been wilder things to come on the evening news.

Your relationship with data

Your organization and you have a unique relationship that you should nourish. That is the one you have with your data. Your data, how well you keep track of it and how well you use it, will make your business.

You should look at all the ways the people in your organization utilize the data. How they extract, how they compile statistics, how they summarize what they need. If a person is taking some data and analyzing it in Excel consistently, then here is an object of data that your organization might find valuable. This object of data should be backed up and possibly incorporated into the offerings for the rest of the organization.

How you look at data is very important. It is not just a bunch of addresses or sales figures in a table that can be searched. It is the life blood of the organization.

Reporting and querying data is not enough. The end results may need to be incorporated into a unified system of delivery to the rest of the organization. What is important to one might be revolutionary to another.

Documentation

I just got done doing a documentation project. If there is one thing I dread doing is documentation. It is boring work and when you are in the midst of writing and dissecting someone else's code and you look outside at a beautiful day, you just want to jump up and leave.

I finished the project on time and under budget. I went to the project wrap meeting and the people involved with the databases were passing them on to a new group. Everyone was thankful to have the documents and the descriptions. It had not been done for these databases and there had been many developers with their hands in these databases. The work I did turned out to be very worth while for the organization.

As I was working on the project I realized so many mistakes that had happened during the development. When you pick apart a database you get a feel for what had happened during coding. If the developers had documented as they went along, most of the problems could have been avoided. Also, the need to pay me to do the documentation would not have been necessary.

I guess the moral of the story is to do your documentation and do it diligently. It will save you time and money over the long run and the next time you see one of my systems.... good luck finding the supporting document :)