HAMBURGER OR LOBSTER

HAMBURGER OR LOBSTER?

By W H Inmon

You walk into the restaurant and the waiter asks you – “what do you want tonight? Hamburger or lobster?”

Most people would choose lobster.

The same choice is being made when you consider building a corporate card catalog. Your card catalog for documents.

Almost everyone appreciates the need for a corporate card catalog. Corporations have documents lying around everywhere – contracts, reviews, reports, articles, resumes, memos, etc. You name it. And these documents have been collecting for a long time now. When it comes time to find one of these documents, panic sets in. Panic, followed by a frenzied effort by staff members to find the document. There is general chaos until the document is found. If, in fact, it is ever found.

Deadlines pass. Opportunity passes. Management becomes disgruntled and grouchy.

With a corporate card catalog you can easily find the document you are looking for, in much the same way that the library allows you to search through the many books in the library. You don’t just walk into the library and start searching through the stacks. Instead, you go to the card catalog. Then you know exactly which stack to go to in order to find your book.

That is what your corporation needs.

The amount of time, money and frustration that is unnecessary and a waste that can be saved is incalculable when you have a corporate card catalog for documents. And there is little disagreement about that.

Vendors come along and say, 'we can provide that document card catalog for you.' These vendors have this really cool technology called "search." 'Just use our search capabilities and we can provide you the location of the document.' Tada!

Now, what exactly is the vendor saying when they say you can just search for your document?

What they are saying is –

'If we have information about the document on hand, we will search the metadata about the document and maybe the header information about the document. And once we have the metadata and a little bit more, we will call that a card catalog.' Now, is this what you want to identify as the document? It is kind of like saying – "I want to eat a hamburger, not lobster." Because merely looking at the metadata about a document does very little for you.

It helps, but not a lot.

What you really want is to be able to get inside the contents of the document and find out what is really there. What you need is to be able to look into the contents of the document and place those contents into your card catalog. Now you can do some really in-depth analysis. What you need to eat is lobster, not hamburger.

So when it comes time for you to choose how to build your card catalog, you have a decision to make, do I want a superficial card catalog that works some of the time? Or do I want a card catalog that goes deeply into the contents of the document.

Hamburger or lobster.

It’s your choice.

Give a ring to Datavox if you want to hear about a lobster based corporate document card catalog.

Bill Inmon lives in Denver with his wife and his two Scotty dogs – Jeb and Lena. A few days ago Lena got a shampoo and trim. She lorded it over Jeb. Then a few days later Jeb got his shampoo and trim. He gloated when he saw Lena.