Data.

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company

I'll concede an allocation of time to today's pressing necessity. The necessity involves an internal deadline I've missed at least a hundred times. The concession involves the limited storehouse of intellectual energy available to me at Cricket Song.

A nonbinding deadline to provide original content for the Business Vortex subsite at CornDancer.com clashes with the binding deadline to post two Letters from Cricket Song each week. Hands down, the Vortex loses.

To be frank, I haven't detected too much demand for either of the formats, but I'm a dogged old hound. (To those handful of the true blue out there, I shout: Thanks!) I'll keep pushing my heavy dream forward into the marketplace until it flies, or until the shrieks of the hawk push me out the door and into the world, where I can hammer nails, wait tables, or patrol the perimeter for hire.

What I'm trying to articulate is.... although I'd rather go forth and refute a few popular prejudices of the day, or ponder the remote and primordial household of the soul.... although I'd like to analyze and perhaps deconstruct "New Internet Users" and "Who's Not Online," two very recent reports from the radical left's Pew Internet and American Life Project.... although I'd prefer to pursue any of a dozen intriguing lines of inquiry into issues of culture, philosophy, myth, and the Spirit.... I just can't. CornDancer's Business Vortex is too long neglected. If I don't move forward now, I'd just as well chunk the Vortex into my tackle box of lures that didn't draw fish.

The Swiftest Way of the Juxtaposition.
The Vortex is intended to capitalize on my working knowledge of small business issues and opportunities with a special emphasis on local networks and related computer technologies. When the CornDancer site was launched in mid-summer, the Vortex provided the smallest of foundations for a sketchy superstructure of web-based endeavor. I decided at a conceptual altitude of high hope to juxtapose business and art, link technology to letters, and place a gallery in the cyber marketplace. The swiftest way to go forward, I concluded, was to raise the site, bare bones and expectant, then build the edifice on the fly.

In the seventy days hence, CornDancer.com has developed along some delightful and promising lines, but the Business Vortex is bogged-down in stagnant waters.

Maybe you can see why I've stalled out. I've waded about 400 words deep into Missive the Twenty-First and haven't gotten to the point yet. The point, if I can recall it correctly, was to direct this week's portion of intellectual energy into one of the topics I've identified on the Business Vortex, rather than toss it into the Well of Cricket Song and listen to the echoes for inspiration. There's only so much of that class of energy I can muster from deadline to deadline. I'll just have to polish a topic here on the pages of Cricket Song, then migrate it over to another sector of the web.

Identifying Relationships 'tween Data and Business.
Data, then, is the prima materia of a computer network. Collecting it, analyzing it, and managing it constitute the only sensible reason to build and maintain a Local Area Network (Local Net). All else is luxury.

Think about what sustains your business at the core level: the production and sale of goods or services, and the income which productivity and profit generate for ownership and employees.

You make something and you sell it. You record the sale, invoice the sale, and collect payment for the sale. You put the money in the bank, pay your bills, and balance the account. This fundamental cycle produces a flow of cash to maintain daily operations. It keeps the doors open and the power on.

By repeating the cycle fast enough and often enough, a business generates profits, bonuses, raises, increased capacity, and marketplace power. It may even create wealth.

A piece of data in one form or another is attached to each transaction in the cycle: orders are entered, tracked, and fulfilled; production and inventory are monitored, managed, and replenished; receivables, payables, and payroll are calculated, recorded, deposited, and disbursed.

A Zillion Fields and Fragments.
Even at small businesses, these diverse and interconnected pieces of data spawn thousands of files, a zillion fields and fragments of names and numbers, facts and figures.

How important to your success is this data -- and the management of it?

How do you effectively engage data management challenges -- and toward what end? How do you analyze the zillion facts and figures to align them with production objectives, marketing goals, and bottom-line operational requirements?

These questions raise complex issues along multiple lines of inquiry. Each has a good answer.

The process of arriving at the answers can be downright stimulating to a small business. It will uncover and define problems, test the resourcefulness of employees, and reveal previously unseen opportunities. It often demands tough decisions about staff and budgets.

The Latin root for data, datum, means "something given." That something can be translated into indispensable information, which can lead to knowledge, and you guessed it: give managers and owners the power to win in the competitive business climate of the day.

That said, let's get down to specifics....

Awake, Prepare for the Next Pursuit.
Hello! Awake, O Cricket reader. If you've stuck with me this far, I'm ready to release you to other pursuits. Almost.

Now I can move forward with the Data section of the Vortex. You're welcome to browse. There's much to develop there, too: reviews of accounting and business management software packages, options regarding primary data base technologies, the promise inherent in knowledge discovery through data analysis. So many avenues, so many splendid options!

If you recall the dryness of last Friday's Missive the Twentieth, Harvest Song of Death, I'm pleased to announce that the physical drought is broken. The rain gauge in Cricket Song's garden recorded 4.1 inches o'er the weekend! A cold front persists. I sing hallelujah.

Other issues raised by the Harvest Song, however, remain open to further inquiry. I've not climbed out of the Valley of Dry Bones just yet. Have you? Another Golden Calf of materialism, I've been told, was spied trying to rise from ashes in the psychic garbage dumps of Babylon, the wasteland only a few miles south of the citadel. My private little war 'tween optimism and entropy.... Dadburn it, it still rages.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE TWENTY-SECOND
in your mailbox sometime 'round midnight
on Friday, September 29, 2000 (Michelmas).
If you don't want any of my missives, let me know.
I'll remove you from the subscription list immediately upon demand.
On the other hand, if you want to add a friend or associate to the list,
please forward their name and email address to
ebenezer@corndancer.com

Visit the web site at www.corndancer.com