Sessions Six and Seven

Session six's lesson on transactions and operations optimized through information technology was interesting. I guess I never considered how complicated tracking retail or manufacturing information could be. I once worked for a small insurance company that went into bankruptcy. I can look back now and see that they weren't making good use of IT. They had customer service representatives and needed to track their call length averages, and they didn't have an enterprise wide system to do so- so they tried to have me, their executive assistant, develop one in Excel. Needless to say, this didn't work very well. At the time, I had just discovered databases and wasn't very aware of their inner workings and capabilities. I started planning a database program for them just before I left the job. They could have used that!

The company also used a lot of data entry, even though they used standardized forms that could have been scanned with the right technology. Even the accountants entered in data by hand and programmed their own spreadsheets. They then checked their figures by hand. It was all very inefficient, and what they needed was a CIO, which they didn't have. The company is still in existence and I often wonder if they ever managed to get a handle on the need IT functions of their business.

Each region had regional managers who compiled and tracked data, and then passed it up to the higher managers. However, they weren't always working off the most up to date data, and due to all the data entry, it may not have been as accurate as was needed, either.

What they needed was an enterprise system that would have had a database for all their transactions, subsidiaries, financials, and clients' information that then could be manipulated as needed.