Blog: Jill Dyche

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The Moment Has Arrived

In which Jill has the moment that most women dread--and is grateful when she discovers it's anticlimactic.

Every woman has a moment where she thinks to herself—or shrieks aloud, depending on the circumstance—“Omigod. I’m turning into my mother.” I had that moment last Thursday. And, to make matters worse (or better), I wasn’t standing before a mirror or admonishing a child, I was meeting with a client.

You see my mother had a parenting style that was ahead of its time. She was never pedantic. She didn’t lecture or finger-wag. She raised neither voice nor paddle. She simply encouraged us to think about the “eventual outcome” of our decisions and weigh the consequences of our actions. She was sober and deliberate and encouraging. There were plenty of skinned knees.

So here I am sitting the headquarters of this consumer packaged goods firm talking to a director. He wonders why he has five full-time people managing the company’s product item master. The company runs a packaged ERP system that requires a heavy amount of customization and lots of manual effort. The director knows that there are business processes that aren’t automated. He also knows that the system’s data is bad—and getting worse.

For instance, every time a new part appears on a purchase order, these five busy managers schedule a meeting and discuss the new product. They try to determine whether the new product resembles another product, if it matches a current product, if it’s already been defined or could otherwise already exist on the item master list. Sometimes the product has more than one manufacturer—think 3/4-inch Number 5 bolt, ten threads-per-inch coming from multiple factories—and they have to work that out too. Most of the time the team suspects the product already exists in the database. But confirming this isn’t as easy as simply creating a new record for the product. Sometimes these meetings get tense. Business people have to be called, and sometimes business executives show up to mediate. And so it goes.

I found myself asking the director what his desired outcome was. I inquired whether the manual management and reconciliation of data was worth the effort. I speculated about other work the five managers could be doing if they weren’t tussling over data. I asked the director to think about why he was unwilling to front the budget money for a data quality tool that could profile the data and automate its reconciliation. I was sober and, other than the welfare of my client, I had no agenda. Nothing doctrinaire, just some gentle guidance.

That’s when my Mother Moment hit me. But, in a supernatural moment of kismet, it’s also when my client saw the light. “Well, could we work up some sort of prototype project?” he asked tentatively. Breakthrough. Thanks, Mom!

Technorati tags: data quality, data quality tool, data reconciliation

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