Woke up today to 3C temperature outside. The seasons are changing and the length of the days is shortening. Soon the clocks will “Fall back” and the journey to and from work will be done in the dark.
Come the 28th October at 2:00am this year, British
Summer Time ends and the time changes to 1:00am. This always involved an
arduous ritual of setting all the house clocks and watches to the correct time.
Of course you might always forget one, the clock in the car being the best
example, and you never know when that mistake can be costly.
If all were changed, they still weren’t in sync. In the case of domestic clocks the few seconds difference might not be critical but there are situations where seconds count. Now more timepieces are centrally controlled either by radio signals or via the Internet. The list includes my computers, smartphones and watches. Life is easy!
In businesses, information experiences the same type of challenge, accurately reporting an update to all users. When a change is not centrally distributed, you are in a similar situation as having to manually change clocks.
Companies must employ ways of centralising information to ensure that an update is broadcasted to all endpoints. It is more efficient in many respects. Takes less time and avoids many mistakes down the line.
Master data management is a discipline designed to address this problem. The idea being that properly tagged and centrally stored information and its changes will always be visible to users. The best starting point will be to design procedures that allow users to access one copy of a document, edit it and have the changes available to all. Think SharePoint, DropBox…
I see the NHS has moved to radio controlled clocks in the hospitals. The savings made by that move must be tremendous and the punctuality benefits immeasurable. This is a good example for businesses to consider when planning how they will process data across the company.
Great Post! Organisations have been centralising business data for years (eg ERP). We need to do the same with security data...
Posted by: Geordie Stewart | 2012.10.17 at 12:18