The Database – always at the heart of a company’s business reality
It might not make for hot button or buzzword heavy conversation today but sometimes one has to plant their feet firmly on the ground – get back to the basic so to speak, right?
Amazingly, 25 years ago, the only people who spoke of Databases (DB) were the IT folks and they were perceived within large enterprises, not just as geeks but as business gurus – they held the secret formulas, some sort of modern day sorcerers.
Over time, the variety of Database available has diversified greatly and in so doing, databases infiltrated the universe of many different departments of businesses; be it the Sales Force with its CRM, Human Resources (HR) with a homemade Access application, the Finance department with their multitude of Excel sheets (even if strictly speaking, they’re not really DBs, it must be pointed out that Excel still manages the largest amount of data stored globally), Production and Purchasing with their ERP, etc. And that’s without counting the best years of Visual FoxPro (certainly one of the best products ever from Microsoft), which has been replaced by SQL, Oracle and many others…
Since that time, we have widely bandied about the term across many levels of business, for example: “I think we have that info in our client DB”…