Grokking Information technology

My days of using handcrafted Access database applications to automate inventory reconcilliation seems to be nothing but a distant blur.  Too soon it seems that I was whisked away from my accounting world of Office applications and surrounded by millions of rows worth of raw data.  There's something about real, raw data that seems to make my nerve edges jingle in a merry way.

After the accounting world, I moved into the world of "fetch and format".  This often feels like the world of high demand, low-cost, digital paintings.  There's an art to it that I haven't yet mastered so onward I plod.  The frustration here is that I often feel that I'm not empowered to take control of information and really build something that creates valuable knowledge for a creative, energetic culture.  Is it my mind that is limiting me?  My skills?

Things started to change recently with some of the new applications and frameworks that the Office team have created; OneNote and Information Bridge Framework (IBF) certainly appeal to me, as does InfoPath to a slightly lesser extent.

In IBF I can clearly see the ability to put useful information at the finger-tips of empowered knowledge workers and insustrial consumers of data.  Having worked in an environment where access to information is vital while preparing financial models in a time-restricted environment I can see the benefits of opening up systems and this seems like a framework that is ready and able to make that a reality.

Once again it is Office products that have my blood surging and my head spinning with plans for putting data through a technological treadmill and producing artefacts of value at the other end.