By Hiran de Silva
Good morning, Jim.
The man you’re looking at is Bob. He’s the Chairman of a large global organisation, with hundreds of offices and thousands of staff around the world.
Bob has recently watched Mynda Treacy’s YouTube tutorial demonstrating how to create a searchable database in an Excel workbook.
He is very impressed.
And Bob has an idea.
Bob is a passionate collector of CDs.
He owns thousands of them.
And he would like to use his collection to bring his staff together.
His idea is simple.
He wants to make his entire CD collection available for his staff to browse, search and borrow.
But Bob wants to go further.
Many of his employees have CD collections of their own.
He wants them to be able to add their CDs to the system too.
The result will be a single, combined catalogue of CDs contributed by employees throughout the organisation.
Any member of staff, anywhere in the world, should be able to browse the collection.
They should be able to search it by artist.
By genre.
By owner.
And, most importantly …
by fuzzy search…
There is, however, one small complication.
Bob’s organisation operates globally.
He does not want spreadsheets being sent backwards and forwards by email.
He does not want files being passed around on shared drives.
He does not want somebody sitting in Head Office collecting spreadsheets and consolidating them.
And he does not want an administrator keeping the system alive.
Once deployed, the system must continue operating without human intervention.
Bob particularly likes the methodology demonstrated in Mynda’s tutorial.
Therefore, he wants you to retain as much of that methodology as possible.
But there is one additional requirement.
Make it global.
Thousands of employees.
Hundreds of offices.
One searchable collection.
Available from anywhere in the world.
Your mission, Jim, should you choose to accept it, is to transform Bob’s Excel workbook database into a globally accessible collaborative database system…
while retaining as much of the original Excel methodology as possible.
As usual, should you or any member of your team be caught using keyboard shortcuts…
the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of this mission.
And all your laptops will be confiscated…
and turned into pumpkins.
Good luck, Jim.
This tape will self-destruct in…
five seconds.
Add comment