If it isn’t available through an API, it doesn’t exist
I am currently writing some new tools for my boss. Basically just a bunch of tools that look at data in a DB and generate pretty graphs for him. You know how bosses like graphs. He asked me to automate a bunch of reporting that is done manually right now, and that is where I am starting.
Basically these reports are running against our online schedule tracking tool for our support folks. All of the data is in a SQL db, so life is good. Looking at the data got me thinking though. If we can get the number of people we have answering the phones for everyday over the past year, what good is that? Not much. What would be valuable is if we looked at the number of people on the phones versus hold times. That is data we could use. It would allow us to pick a hold time that is acceptable and staff to support that time. That would be gaining power from our data.
Unfortunately, our call tracking software doesn’t write it’s info to a standard DB. It is only available through some custom report generating tools they wrote. That might be fine for some companies, but for us if the data isn’t available to other software you might as well not track it.
This is closely in line with a post on Productivity 501: Integration is more important than features. I couldn’t agree more. Going forward, if a piece of software does not provide some sort of API to access the data it uses to generate reports, I am not going to support buying it. As simple as that.
If it isn’t available through an API, don’t waste resources collecting it. It doesn’t actually exist.