Weeds in the Garden, Reports in a CRM System

 

 

Years ago, moved by a yearning to return to the land and break free of the shackles of the supermarket, I planted a garden in my urban backyard.  Not just any garden.  Not a garden slightly larger than the one the year before.  This was the Mother of All Gardens.  Stretching from my back steps to the alley and reaching to the side of my garage, it looked less like a city vegetable patch and more like the Green Giant’s vacation home.

 

Everything was great at first and encouraged and emboldened by some early radishes, I planted more tomatoes.  Then more onions.  Next, more carrots.  Then more cabbage and potatoes and corn and….you get the idea.  By midsummer, the garden was entirely out of control, the weeds were running loose like gang members in the hood, and the cabbage had its hands around the neck of the corn.  Discouraged, I abandoned my plans and settled for a frozen TV dinner and a beer.

 

Similarly, I am familiar with a CRM system that was laid out with the best of intentions and greatest of care, but fell beyond the reasonable control of the system administrators (the “gardeners”).  Like me when I planted my huge patch of plants, these gardeners of data did the best they could, but their knowledge was limited, the rollout rushed, and mistakes were made.  Most of those errors were of only middling importance, as were most of mine, but one was near fatal. 

 

When I set out to create Green Acres in my yard, I thought of many things, but the one that I didn’t was weeds.  I failed to put down mulch to control them and I failed to aggressively cull them before they could strangle the useful plants and then go to seed.

 

When these administrators set out to create the best CRM system they could, they were particularly delighted that their users were freed from the yoke of having to ask the Zeus like DBA in IT to create reports in SQL for them.  Rather, with only a little training, they could create ad hoc reports to their heart’s content.  More complex ones could be whipped up by their eager and helpful administrators in short order.  Even dashboards were easily built.

 

What our friends with the rolled up sleeves and their hands in the warm soil of data didn’t notice at first was that just like weeds, reports have a way of multiplying.  As sales people came and left, the reports they sowed in public folders stayed.  Managers crafted (0r had someone craft for them) great works of reportage—which then promptly became stale, inaccurate, and were still used to steer the business.  Worst of all, in this particular system, reports tied to dashboards could not be deleted at all, much like once the kudzu entwined my sweet peas, I could not kill it without destroying the crop.

 

At the end of the summer, I was getting a trickle of tomatoes, a bit of basil, but that’s all.  The rest fell victim to my carelessness.  In the CRM system I’ve alluded to, it isn’t that bad yet, but there are thousands of weeds, rogue reports that threaten to decimate the harvest of useful business intelligence.

 

My garden could have been saved by better planning.  If I had known to lay down black plastic and mulch to reduce the weeds that sprouted, if I had known to kill them the second they started to run amuck, and most of all, if I had know not to plant too big a plot that I couldn’t control with my skill and resources, it would have ended much better. 

 

In the same vein, our tale’s administrators should have done more research into best practices (and actually followed those practices, but that’s a story for another day).  They should have severely restricted end user ability to create ad hoc reports, instead encouraging them to bring their needs to the team, so good, vetted solutions could have been shared with everyone.  A regular, detailed process needed to be in place to deal with old, unused reports.  Policies regarding what reports were to be used for mission critical functions should have been in place and honored.

 

It’s far too late for my garden, but these administrators I’ve told you about still have a chance.  It will be ten times harder than if they had mulched from day one, but the battle is winnable.  They will have to endure pain and frustration, but they can and will chop down the report weeds and get their CRM system under cultivation again.  Too much is riding on them to not succeed.

 

If you are today planning a data garden or if yours is already “knee high in July”, take notice of the reports.  They can choke off your project just as quickly as kudzu.   Plan now and your users will thank you, or the corn will grow tall, or…enough with the analogies, but you get the idea!

 

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