Manage Your Data Like A Garden

When I meet people and talk about databases and systems, I always think they miss the point about what makes them useful.  They often talk about a particular piece of software like Salesforce, Hubspot or Tableau.  What they don’t see is that these are just tools. What matters most is the content and how you interact with it. To get the most out of your database, think of your data as a garden.

Content is More Important than Software

When you are in a garden, do you care what was used to create it? Probably not. What matters most to you is how it is arranged.  How it is maintained.  Is it easy to navigate? Has it been weeded?  In this way, great systems are the same.  You plan them, arrange them, maintain them and weed them.  Perhaps this last point is the most important.  Like gardens, databases grow wild. Fields and data elements that at one time were necessary, no longer make sense. Does anyone ever ask why they are there?  Most of the time, people just leave them alone.  Why is this a problem?  It’s a problem because they confuse and distract the user.  They pull their focus away from the more important elements of the system.  They obscure the meaning of the data.  It becomes murky.  It’s analogous to a desk littered with paper.  How can you discern the important papers from the clutter?

Clean Your Data

If you have a database that’s been around awhile, you probably have a lot of fields that you don’t use anymore. They’ve just been hanging around. Users tend to give the program the benefit of the doubt. They see something, they don’t understand it and they say to themselves “hmmm, must be there for a reason”. Well, there once was a reason for it but that doesn’t mean that reason still exists. It could be a field that was added during a transition phase in the company when something needed to be tracked, but the need has gone away. Now you’re at this point where you’re just not sure what to do with it.

Best Approach to Cleaning Your Database

The best way to go about cleaning up your database is to print out the screens or reports that you use most. Then take a highlighter or red pen and circle all the items you want to remove. The ask the programmer to simply hide these fields from the screens, reports and downloads. This is much less drastic than deleting fields and if you’ve had your database for a long time, you might not be 100% sure that something should be removed. This will give you the benefits of a leaner, tighter database without the paying the cost of losing something important.

While you’re at it, this would also be a good time to update your documentation, or put it together for this first time. These would be a collection of notes in a document that just explained the important stuff. My last blog post might give you some ideas. You don’t need to get bogged down in explaining that the field called “Customer” means the “Customer Name”. That’s not productive! But you probably have fields that don’t have an obvious purpose for someone seeing if for the first time. For example, you might be tracking a “Client Status” and it would be important to know what the various values mean for your business process. You don’t have to spend a ton of time on this but it will go a long way to helping you keep your data garden well maintained.

You can do a lot of this on your own! If you find that you need some assistance or just don’t want to do it yourself, maybe we can help. Reach out for a free consultation.