Questions

Q: Can you say more about the 'Dataleaf® Database' design ...

George: The Dataleaf® Database design underlies most of our products and many of our services.

A Dataleaf® Database has certain invariable characteristics. Basically, it 'knows' a whole lot about its own contents and structure, not just at a platform level, but also at the application level, where a user can get at it.

It also 'knows' quite a lot about its own data quality, especially when it is incorporated in a data mart application.

In an e-solution, a Dataleaf database often supplies information to server-side processes to guide in the creation of forms and dynamically create report layout. It supplies summary statistics to client-side processes, and small client side caches which the user never sees directly, by which materially speed up performance. Thus, as a user, I can instantly see population-wide summary statistics AND data history AND alternate field names ... for any field I happen to care about ... triggered by the user with a simple mouse-over gesture, and without a round trip to the server.

A Dataleaf® Database usually incorporates a lot of knowledge of data history. It tracks alternative names for the same field, so it can support legacy report-definition assets. It can have several levels of data quality screening and triage ... one for now, a stricter one for six months in the future, and a still stricter one for a year from now ... so the user can see trouble coming!

Q: You characterize Dataleaf as a specialist practice, but your offerings appear diverse ... ?

George: If you look at the logical infrastructure, our offerings are not actually diverse. What we do is really very limited in it's internal approach to problems. Just about everything we license, and everything we use, incorporates our same old familiar logical infrastructure — the Dataleaf® Database.

Of course we are always wondering what other HR and Payroll tasks our software infrastructure may be good for. If we see a potential offering ... and if we already understand the surrounding business issues for HR or Payroll ... and if we are sure it will be technically easy to implement on top of the software we already have ... we go ahead and do it, because it is a short step to another useful service or product.

Q: Dataleaf has had a large number of clients, for a relatively specialized firm. How does this work out?

George: The short answer is, we serve a good number of different clients because we have to. We have lots of offerings that are delivered for a short time, serve their purpose, and then end ... I mean, actually, spontaneously end ... which of course some vendors' offerings never do.

When we serve a particular group of related clients, there may be tens of data streams that are partly separate, and perhaps ten distinct HR and Payroll departments to work with at once. So in terms of the services they need, we find that our clients are still very dissimilar, even if they are subsidiaries of one parent organization. We have to treat each one in a very, very distinct way.

Just as each client requires a substantially different process, each one requires substantially different services; each provides different staff members to us as contacts; and each one may need a completely discrete technical data flow, in whatever we do for them. In fact, our in-house software is designed to support just this sort of diversity.

Dataleaf Technologies, Inc. is a Massachusetts corporation founded in 1987 (as SSR, Inc). It is a computational and consulting practice serving HR and Payroll in organizations of all sizes - from a few hundred to about fifty thousand employees. 

Our business is based on a single, compact set of methods and software components, the Dataleaf® Database technology. 

Pages 'About Us' ...

• Introduction
• Our Business
• Our Clients
• Questions