What Were We Thinking?

We created GHS to give life to our core business philosophies: work should be enjoyable; your data is your servant; and accessibility is key.

Work Should Be Enjoyable

This is easy for us to put into practice, because we really enjoy what we do. We enjoy working with our clients — understanding their needs and building systems that meet those needs. All of our products — custom software or off-the-shelf products — are created to be easy-to-use and easy-to-learn. This is to make your work enjoyable as well.

Your Data is Your Servant

Data is a resource, and an expensive one; but it has little value on its own. After you gather your data, you need to:

• analyze it effectively, so it becomes information which will help you make better decisions;
• use it efficiently and keep it fresh, so it can serve you on an ongoing basis; and
• get it to the people who need it, the way they need it, all the while keeping it synchronized and up-to-date.

GHS makes your data serve you better by creating analysis tools. It can be hard to work with large amounts of raw data; but as in any endeavor, well-crafted tools increase productivity and success. GHS examines your business rules, goals and desired products, and creates easy-to-use tools that allow you to quickly and effectively interact with your data. In doing so, we help you transform this raw resource into a valuable and vital commodity.

But, how often have you seen people collect data, have it sit around, watch it grow old, then go and collect it again? Or gather data for a project, then gather the same data again for a different project? Often, large-scale operations like cities, universities or companies need data for various processes or milestones, but then have no system in place to keep that data current. This wastes money and time that could be better spent on — well, almost anything. GHS builds systems that help you keep your data fresh, and reward you for doing so. This includes management and planning systems that don't end their useful lives when a project is completed, but continue to help you manage or plan into the future.

Even fresh, however, your data will do you no good if it's hoarded. If you make it difficult for people to access or use data, then it will never achieve its full potential. Various actors in your organization need to interact with your data in different ways. For example, one person might be in charge of daily maintenance of an asset, someone else might schedule use of the asset, and yet another may need fiscal information about it. If all of these people keep their data in different places, it will soon grow stale and fall out of sync. We help you store your data centrally, and allow each user to access it remotely with custom interfaces that allow them to get the information they need to get their job done. This also helps ensure that all data remains synchronized and current, since updates by one person will be published throughout the system.

Accessibility is Key

Data and systems are only useful if they are accessible. This leads us to two further conclusions:

Proprietary systems are counterproductive

A proprietary system is hardware or software that can only be accessed by hardware or software from the same manufacturer. We have seen countless examples where clients have purchased systems to manage their data — only to see their data become hostage to those systems. "We'd love to use the data we have collected," they say, "but it's in XX software and we can't get to it." Your data cannot work for you if it is locked up in some proprietary system.

At GHS, we use data formats that are open and readily accessible. In today's business environment, you can't afford to trust your data to a piece of software that will lock it away. What if the manufacturer disappears? Or what if it suddenly decides a 300% hike in fees is good for business? By using readily available tools, GHS creates systems that you can revise in the future — with or without our help. That gives you control.

It's your data — it should work for you.

Section 508 compliance is just good business sense

Making systems accessible to differently-abled individuals generally doesn't require enormous expenditure - just some creative and directed thinking about who needs to use what information and how. Following Section 508 guidelines is good corporate citizenship, but it also opens your systems up to new users among your internal and external publics. Accessibility is a win-win, and that's always a good idea.

What This All Means

At Gray Hill Solutions, we go beyond learning your needs to learning your business rules, desired outcomes, and institutional arrangements. We make software and data systems that help you get your work done in a way that increases your efficiency but also respects how you work. The data we gather is built into systems with the goal of being self-updating and shared — decreasing the amount of time needed to coordinate data between different parts of your business. And we store data in common formats that will ensure that you can use our systems, but also build your own in the future. In effect, we are making ourselves replaceable at your option; and that means that we have to stand behind our products, and give you the best service available.

By living up to our philosophies and corporate goals, we help you live up to yours.