What Margaret actually knew

About this episode

The episode discusses the often-overlooked role of individuals like 'Margaret' who manage and synthesize critical data within organizations.

So what did Margaret know? Let me ask you this - how many companies have you worked in where there is an expensive Enterprise Resource Planning system or a Customer Relationship Management System, and there was often one person who knew how to assemble the ‘right’ information for the management meetings? I have consulted for organizations that bought Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP, and then built an invisible second infrastructure out of Excel files, email chains, and one person who could pull it all together by Tuesday morning. That person was sometimes a manager, sometimes an admin, sometimes whoever happened to be organized and patient enough to do the work nobody assigned. I will call her Margaret, because every company I have ever worked in had someone like that. Margaret pulled data from four systems that did not talk to each other, reconciled the numbers, and built a summary on the schedule that reflected how decisions were actually made. The VPs who received her Monday email had no idea how the file worked. They just knew that when Margaret was on vacation, the week felt wrong. Nobody called this anything. It was just how the week got done. But it had the shape of a quiet…

People in this episode

Host: Tom Parish

Topics covered

• Enterprise Resource Planning
• Customer Relationship Management
• data management
• organizational behavior
• information systems

Keywords

• data synthesis
• management meetings
• Excel files
• information gaps
• organizational knowledge

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, law firm