You've known Jamie on-and-off for a few years. She also works in your company but she doesn't work in your office. She is more of a mid-manager and not as much of a worker-bee. You feel that getting her higher level view would give you a different prospective on the problem. And she might have an idea for a solution that you never even thought of.
You: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today about this. I'm very interested in hearing what your thoughts are on this problem.
Jamie: Well, I'm thinking that if this is critical to your job, and your boss wouldn't have asked you to do this unless it was, then you should see about getting someone to setup a database on the ORACLE server. The IT groups uses the ORACLE database for all of the enterprise level systems. I think you should talk to the IT group about setting up a database on their server to hold this information for you.
You: Huh. Do you think they would do that for us? Isn't that a lot of work?
Jamie: Well, they did something like that for us when we were trying to get information together about the training that everyone has been going to and what they are planning on going to. We have to track the people in each of the divisions and who they work for and what training they have taken and what they want to take. The upper management wants to keep an eye on making sure that the people have the ability to get the training they need to do their jobs.
You: That seems like we are keeping similar bits of information but you are keeping information for everyone in the company. We are looking at keeping just information about our customers. I don't know if the IT group will feel that our information is that important for them to put it on their database server.
Jamie: You'll never know until you ask them.
You: Ok. Saying that they say "OK" to doing that. Do you have any idea what they will have to do on our machines, or what we will have to do to enter and get access to the information?
Jamie: Well, once they have the database up then they would just build some screens in ORACLE and then they would give you accounts on the server so you can access our database. The IT group will come around and install the ORACLE client on each of your machines. Then it's just easy as filling out a form to put the information in the system.
You: Ok. How do they know what information we want?
Jamie: When they agree to do this then they will get with you to define your information formats and structures. Once they have that then they can build your database.
You: Ok. What are any other advantages that we would get by going this route? So far it seems that there's a good bit of work to do and most of it is getting the IT group to be willing to not only do just about all of the work but to also agree that we can get on their enterprise data server.
Jamie: Well, everyone in your group could access the information at the same time. Actually you could have everyone in the company access the information at the same time. Those servers are really powerful. But because your information would be in your database then you can have them limit the access just to your group. Needless to say the IT group could see the information since they can see everything on the server. Also since it's on the enterprise database server it would be constantly backed-up. Most systems are only backed-up nightly. The enterprise database server is mirrored so everything written to one system is written to the other. That way there isn't much of a chance of you loosing anything.
You: And?
Jamie: Well, you won't have to buy anything since the company already has the server and it would just be the IT groups time and effort to do the work. And it's a very fast system. You can quickly search through records and everything. Reporting is also very simple once setup.
You: Thanks Jamie. This has given me something to think about.
Now you can go ahead and look at a summary of lessons learned from your Jamie interview.
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