No one ever needs to be typing numbers in if they already exist

Back in the second half of the 1800s, the United States was joined from one end to the other by railroad and the economy exploded. Compared to horse and cart, it was a game changer by orders of magnitude. That one new technology – the steam engine – in that place, had a massive impact.

Similarly, in business today, I feel that something I have come to call the hashtag#DataRailroad is coming. In my opinion, the technical equivalent of the pony express is constructing a board room Powerpoint presentation by taking screenshot of spreadsheets. Sound familiar to anyone?

Organisations that still do this have to operate very slowly and carefully to avoid the risk of something important going wrong, because its only human to err. We aren’t robots, after all.

I’ve seen some shocking things in my career.

Often a mad dash to get some numbers in for an emergency VIP meeting tomorrow morning, but it doesn’t add up right because everyone interpreted the request differently.

Perhaps everyone rounded their percentages to make their performance look better and somehow we have miraculously achieved 110% market share.

A department manager fearing for their job because they think they lost 10k in their budget because they printed it out and typed it back in again.

A flagship store being sold off because there was a small but critical typo on their annual performance forecast.

I think its a fair bet that any business that uses computers probably already has ways of connecting the data from the source to the destination. No one ever needs to be typing numbers in if they already exist digitally. Whether users prefer MS or Google or even something else, there is always a way to connect it all up to the hashtag#DataRailroad.

It’s coming soon. Choo choo!