part 1
July 2003
Most facility departments have a wealth of information but inadequate means to organize it. To manage the wide spectrum of facility information properly, facility managers must understand the term database in its most basic sense.
Great care must be exercised in designing and selecting management tools that enable facility managers to find what they are looking for—even when they are rushed, cannot remember where the information is, do not remember its name, and may not even know exactly what to look for. The management tool for these tasks is a database. Before you design a database, however, it is important to understand the relationship between information and data.
Data vs. Information vs. Knowledge vs. Action
Databases form the necessary foundation for managing current projects and programs and for projecting future costs and facility management department activities. Data by itself, however, is fairly useless. A skilled analyst can take raw data and manipulate it to extract patterns, trends, and inferences—information—that explain relationships between the events that constitute the data. Therefore, employment figures that reveal an organization had 300 staff members in 1997 and 350 in 2001 are data; the observation that the number of employees increased between 1997 and 2001 is information.
Knowledge takes information one step further by putting it in the context of experience. Mere information (for example, the increase in employment between 1997 and 2001) means more when put in the context of a comparison to the increase that has occurred since then, or of employment increases within a given state, or of sales volume for a company, or of the local economy. Knowledge, therefore, is information used to explain something.
With data given meaning and turned into information and information turned into knowledge by reference to other experience, action is possible. Without knowledge, it would be almost impossible to gauge whether a given course of action is prudent or to predict what its consequences might be.
The Database as Institutional MemoryA database serves as the institutional memory pool for a business. It is the place where a new employee can go for data and information about the business and its people, operations, history, performance, assets, and resources when other people and their memories are not available. This situation occurs when long-term employees retire, project managers go on vacation, obscure facts must be rediscovered, or, as is usually the case, there is simply too much detail for the human mind to track systematically. Businesses use a database to record whatever human minds cannot reliably and consistently retain on their own.
Basic Issues in Database Design
The term database is usually used in the context of automation: for example, a data file in a spreadsheet program, a database program, a collection of word processor text files, or the CAD drawings in a CAFM system. However, hard-copy drawings, photographs, and paper files are just as much data as are magnetic codes electronically imprinted on computer disks or tape. Therefore, it is critical to consider hard-copy data sources as viable components of a facility database. A database is literally a base of data-a base on which information is developed and decisions are made.
Despite the massive movement toward automation and electronic data, hard copy is still the baseline or reference point. (In fact, most software programs emulate hard-copy formats that have been in use for many years.) Very few people would instinctively consider automation their first source for all the forms of information they access. Automation is still a secondary source of many types of information, especially such large documents as textbooks and sets of oversize drawings. The smaller the document, however, the more likely it is to be automated, because software can handle such documents easily.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Communication via E-mail, for instance, can originate only on computers, thus making them the primary source. Reports based on analyzing and sorting masses of information, such as spreadsheets and large databases, are now almost exclusively computer based.
Most facility managers find themselves in a multiple-media environment: that is, having multiple ways to store and retrieve data and to communicate. Messages can be sent by phone, voice mail, E-mail, fax, and pager, as well as during actual face-to-face meetings. Text can be stored in hard copy, on disk, or on microfiche. The point is that facility managers should make conscious choices about how facility data are stored, transmitted, and retrieved. This means there will always be a mix of media and that facility managers must maintain the best balance, acknowledging existing work patterns and investments made in equipment.
A database’s utility depends on how easy it is to find data and retrieve them quickly. As the size of a database increases, so do the problems of organizing the database and keeping it simple to use. To function effectively and properly, a facility database must be designed carefully. Here are some typical symptoms of faulty design:
- Much of what is stored is unnecessary junk.
- What is important is not adequately protected.
- Specific responsibility for updating records is not clearly defined.
- Rights of access to records are not clearly spelled out.
Understanding these symptoms is key to setting up a database that works for your facilities. There are specific issues to be considered if these problems are to be avoided. Next month, we’ll detail these issues to get you on the way to setting up or refining your facility database.