Mapping our future.

While last month we were focused here in the national office on clean up of the membership records to prepare for the upgrades in technology, this month is all about mapping our data to smooth the transition into NEON's system. I know you are very jealous. ;>)

I have been working with Anne Potter of Extreme Consulting going over all of our records. We have begun to decide which information needs to be ported to the new system. We have also begun to map our data to NEON's data management system. What this means is that if you have two tables, Table 1 and Table 2, and want to move data from one to the other you have to be able to say "I want information in Table 1 Column A to move to Table 2 Column A." This is not necessarily a difficult issue but it is time consuming because you have to dig in and decipher how the information is stored. Why? Well, because we have two tables that name things very differently. As an example:

table 1 in our case is Raiser's Edge which labels its column that has our membership's first names in it as:
CnAdrSal_Salutation
Katie
Jennifer

meanwhile, table 2 NEON labels it's column for first names as:
First Name
Katie
Jennifer

So to move this data we have to tell NEON to "map" the column entitled "CnAdrSal_Salutation" to send its information to Neon's "First Name" column. Again, not necessarily difficult but as you can see Raiser's Edge is a bit more cryptic than NEON in its choices which actually is the epitomy of how both data management systems choose to conduct business in general.

Anyway, that process is in its final stages which means that we are one step closer to going live with all of our exciting upgrades in technology and the benefits that will offer our membership! We are all anticipating that by this time next month we here in the national office should be getting ready to begin staff training on how to use the new system which means that we are even closer to opening the new system, new opportunities and new benefits up to you.

More soon: here on the blog, in E-Notes and in the editorials of Overtones!
Katie