By Mindy Williams

Answer this riddle: What is everywhere, yet only in one place, at the same time? What needs optimum health, yet can't have its temperature taken?

Got the answer? It's your Clients & Profits database. And it's your network that requires optimum health in order to manage the diverse hardware, software, and documents necessary to run your agency.

A good system manager could probably answer those questions with little effort. Hopefully you have a hero to answer the call when the system needs help. You're courting disaster without one.

The Clients & Profits system manager is usually not a one-hat position. Instead, it's an important responsibility added to someone's normal duties. The Clients & Profits system manager might be the general system manager, controller, AE, or an outside company that specializes in system management.

"Our owner asked for a volunteer to take on the responsibilities of C&P system manager&endash;and everyone but me took one step back," says Ray Williams, chief financial officer at Robert Rytter & Assoc. "I'm also the IS manager, but if I run into a situation where I need assistance, we have an outside service that helps with any highly technical aspects of system management."

Angela Albanese, accounting supervisor for Bandy Carroll Hellige Advertising, became the C&P system manager after a horrific chain of events. "When the IT employee crashed our system, we discovered that the database hadn't been getting backed up daily," Angela says. "We lost three month's worth of data." Now Angela makes a daily backup, with a permanent weekly backup on a CD.

While C&P system managers should know all the technical issues of Clients & Profits, they can't be responsible for the quality of data entered. But system managers should be aware of what needs to be entered to ensure a good start, and what needs to be done to keep the database running smoothly.

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