Doing What I Do

I'm an info systems specialist, who does odd jobs for a living. I'm one of the people who, when asked "Do we have this information and can we get it in this form?" says yes, no, or I'll look into it.

I've been in Info Systems since the late 60's, and one thing that is becoming more apparent each year is that everyone knows things and presumes that among the things known is how something has to be done to be effective.

More and more, when someone wants something, that someone will take up a lot of time telling me what to do and, often, how to do it. Nobody any more tells me what it is that they hope to accomplish, which would go a long way towards getting an optimum result.

Where I work, most of our data is stored in Oracle - partly because one of our major systems is purchased and was written to use Oracle, and partly because it is a good product, with a long life and a solid company behind it. It is also reasonably easy to use when I write stuff in the language I use most of the time, and while there is a lot that I do not know, I understand how stuff is stored and have written enough code that I can usually do whatever is needed if the data exists in any rational format.

Just an example - I was asked to strip down a Personnel database and a Mobile Phones database so the bosslady could load the resulting files into Excel and use Excel to find out what phones were in use by people who weren't our employees any more - so we would know to turn them off. A couple of fields from one and a couple of fields from another, creating two files.

I had designed both databases, and knew they could be tied together in retrieval, so I did what was asked, and in one file added one field from the other database, giving one of the files all the info needed to avoid writing the Excel program. Then I thought some more about it and wrote an extract to create a file showing only phones assigned to people who were gone.

In the end, the person who actually had to use the data was as happy as a clam to get only 79 records to deal with instead of 800+ with only some labeled as needing attention. The person who originally directed that I do this was dismayed to see that there was no longer a need for the Excel program to do the comparison - but ran it anyhow and it worked, and it verified my results. I'd've had it two days earlier had it been clear what we were trying to accomplish - which was to find out if we had any cell phones assigned to people we no longer employ.

Then this morning I found that there was to be an inventory comparing our vendor's data about who was using what phone to ours. I found that wity minimal massaging I could download from the vendor site a detailed statement, parse it and pass it against our equipment and personnel databases and come up with a list of mismatched names - reducing the number of records to be examined from 1400 to around 200 - but this time I was asked if there was a way to take the vendor data and validate it against our data.

I guess the message here is if someone is going to be doing something for you, rather than let your preconceived notions of the process guide the request, explain what the desired result is and let the professional pick the methodology. If the pro is a pro and needs more information, you'll get more questions, and if no more questions are needed you'll probably get a happier result a lot faster than if you try to guide the methodology.

Enough of my grumbling. Have a good evening, y'all.