Don’t Forget Your Speakers! A phenomenon I’ve noticed over the years is that my clients will manage speaker data outside of the primary AMS. Often this data is managed in spreadsheets or in a third-party event registration system. And too often, this data never makes its way back into the primary AMS. The key data point, that a …
90% of your data is never touched a second time I heard recently on a podcast that 95% of all the art New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collects is never actually displayed in the museum. It’s stored in a warehouse in New Jersey! Which got me to thinking; how much of the data that we …
Newton’s First Law Part of Newton’s First Law states that “…an object in motion stays in motion…” What does this have to do with data management? Quite a bit, actually. One of the many challenges of data management is the constant grind of keeping data clean. (I refer to this as “weeding the garden.”) With most …
No System is Perfect While it may sound trite, it bears repeating that no data management system is perfect. I have yet to meet an association executive who thinks their system works perfectly. And yet, very often we’ll spend hours trying to find “perfect” software or trying to design the “perfect” data management process. The reality is, if …
Data Accretes One of my very first jobs in the association world was managing the production of a printed directory, a buyer’s guide. Within this buyer’s guide was a list of over 500 different “categories” of equipment. And each time the directory was updated, the number of categories expanded (members always had some new super-special category that didn’t fit …