Answer: Nearly everyone in health care, manufacturing, education, basic research, and service industries, including Six Sigma and ISO 9001 organizations and anyone who needs to demonstrate conformance to standards. (Anyone left?)Since the days when data were collected and maintained manually—on cards or in ledgers—to the electronic age, the sheer amount of data generated has increased exponentially. Hospitals and health care providers, for example, must maintain data on everything from prescriptions delivered, to infection rates, to C-section deliveries and Medicare payments. Just as the manufacturing process was simplified by technology during the Industrial Revolution, it’s hard now even to remember the tedious and laborious manual processes that preceded software data collection. On shop floors and in hospital corridors, clipboards and pencils have been supplanted by PDAs, computers, and voice recognition equipment to ensure accurate collection of data from processes.

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