It was the end of a long day. While sitting over dirty martinis with extra olives, my long-time colleague, Tisha Tomlinson, and I were discussing a situation and trying to plan a strategy that met the needs of all involved. We had spent the day with various quality and environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) personnel at one of our long-time clients. The company’s senior management was pushing to extend our quality software’s use to include EH&S compliance.

Executive management’s logic was that their investment in our software had already been made and was working well for quality. Why maintain similar but totally separate software systems for EH&S if one software could effectively do the job for both? We had spent the better part of the day shuttling between conference rooms to meet with quality and environmental and safety representatives. We couldn’t get them in the same room, much less on the same page.

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