Asking, “Why would my organization need a database?” would be like asking, “Why does a human being need his brain to remember things?”

Have you ever calculated how much time it takes to rifle through a multitude of filing cabinets to find specific documents? Suppose it takes an employee making $20 an hour ten minutes to walk to a records room, find a particular document in a file cabinet, make a copy of the file, deliver the copy to the intended recipient, re-file the original document and return to his desk. If he has to perform that function only six times a day, that’s an hour of lost productivity per day – or about $5,200 per year in wages.