Morning notes
Seems like the equipment worked fine for the meeting yesterday, and it all came back in working order, as well, always a good thing. I told you it was with people I trust to take care of it without my help. There’s not many of them around here, but there are a few. 🙂
I was able to get some work done on the server and in the membership database while everyone was gone. Mostly clean up and maintenance stuff, but stuff that goes a lot quicker if you don’t constantly have people running queries on the database, or 20 people automatically checking email boxes, while you’re trying to do it. While I was in there, I did re-visit a previous memo I wrote about where this stuff needs to head. My vision is for our membership database is to be live online, and interactive, where members can change their own data, register for meetings, interact with each other, and pay their dues all online. The newer versions of the database software we have will do this out of the box, with just a few tweaks. Unfortunately there is such a cultural bias against this software in this company that people don’t even use the version we have for simple things like accounting and meeting registration, so I doubt we’d be able to get a buy-in from everyone to use the new version for all these things, thereby making it worth the significant investment that would be required. Not to mention the fact that no one else appears to share this vision of uniting all of our various bits of information in one place and using it effectively. For example, yesterday was our Annual Meeting, do you realize that we record the registrations for the meeting in an Excel spreadsheet that is then never matched with our membership database? So our salespeople, who have a companies membership record open while talking to that member, have no way of knowing immediately if that person has ever attended one of our meetings. Now you would think they would have been clamoring for this information for years now, but mostly, they don’t care. They “tend not to really have time to look at the records that deeply while they’re on the phone”. Obviously, this is going to be a long, uphill battle.
Speaking of uphill battles, the other thing I noticed while putzing around in the database, are the large number of people who have specifically been told how to handle certain changes, that are still screwing them up. I’d say it’s a training issue, but these are people who’ve been here for a few years and know better, I just need them to pay attention to what they’re doing!
Oh well. hope you’re having a more positive morning!
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