Dan Fink, Editor of the Reading Eagle Business Weekly, recently sat down with Al Weber, president of Tweed-Weber, Inc., to discuss the business of data collection. The conversation below was published in the July 30, 2013 edition of Business Weekly. The original, along with additional content, can be found here.
Al Weber has been in the consulting business since the early 1990s. His company, Reading-based Tweed-Weber, has scratched out a niche as one of the go-to firms for strategic research and planning. He’s something of a wise old hand at making sense of huge piles of data. Weber, who just turned 61, sat down recently to talk about trends in the data-collection business.
Business Weekly: How long have you been doing this? How old is the company?
Al Weber: Tweed-Weber was founded (around) 22 years ago. I had a private consulting firm. Steve Tweed had a private consulting firm, and we merged them together in 1991.
BW: What was your background?
Weber: I worked for a company that sold and implemented management and supervisory sales training programs.
BW: So you come from the planning background, but it sounds like more of the work now is the research piece.
Weber: We started out as a planning company that did some research and over time morphed into a research company that does planning.
BW: How does that work?
Weber: In the typical year, I read maybe 80 research reports and really know what to look for in those reports and how to assess them and to pull the information that matters out of them. Not everybody has the opportunity to spend that much time with reports. While they’re certainly capable of reading it and understanding what is said in the report, they may not know how to take it to the next level, and that is to determine how it’s useful to them. That’s another big step.
BW: In health care, there’s all this effort now to do things like improve patient satisfaction and to gather and convert to electronic medical records. What does that do for somebody in your business in helping health care clients?
Weber: Information has become an essential component to delivering high-quality care. So health care impacts a wide range of organizations, and it does so in many different ways. Some segments are incredibly competitive. The home health care industry as a good example is a very competitive industry right now, and others are less competitive just because the nature of that segment within a marketplace isn’t quite as demanding.
BW: Do you have an example?
Weber: Hospitals compete, there’s no question about that. But they don’t compete in the same way the smaller organizations compete. Reading Hospital (and) St. Joseph’s: They’re both great organizations, and they do compete, but it’s very different than some of the segments in which the barrier to entry is much lower. It’s not easy to say we’re going to start a new hospital today. But someone could say we’re going to start a new home health care agency today, and it could be in operation very quickly, maybe not tomorrow, but within 30-60 days.
BW: One last question. Data gathering has been in the news recently, with Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks. What’s your thought about all of that?
Weber: I can tell you, when it comes to data, we have to realize that the level of privacy we might have thought we had simply doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know how many cameras there are on Penn Square, but let’s start by saying several and count up from there. Every time you walk into a Wawa to get a cup of coffee, six or seven cameras are taking your picture. Every time you go to an ATM, smile because you’re on what’s a really a not-so-candid camera.
BW: Well, we saw all that through the Boston bombing investigation. Those guys were tracked on cameras throughout.
Weber: They were. You are … somewhere in the world probably on a hundred different cameras in the course of an average day. In 2012, we stored more bits of information than we did every other year put together in the history of man. That should tell us that every time that you walk anywhere, there’s someone out there watching you.
— Interview by Dan Fink
(This conversation was posted in the July 30, 2013 edition of the Reading Eagle Business Weekly.)
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