Imagine accessing your iPod Touch or iPhone to check your email and finding not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of email folders—none of them yours.

Several questions race through your mind: Whose are they? How did they get here? Why are there so many? Why are they all empty? Why can’t I get rid of them?

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By now, most of us have experienced vendor “lock-in.” Cell phones sold at a discount in exchange for contract agreements that lock you in to the provider. PC applications that are a nuisance to put up with but would be an even bigger nuisance to switch. And—we all love this one, don’t we?—the surprisingly cheap printer that requires you to buy that company’s surprisingly expensive ink cartridges.

In the business world, we’ve got vendor lock-in and we’ve got it bad. We spend tens of thousands—or tens of millions—of dollars on a complex business system, by which I mean some combination of hardware, software, and business processes sufficiently embedded in the company’s day-to-day operations that it would be extremely painful, difficult, and costly to replace it. Think CRM, ERP, CMS, BI, ILM—the list goes on. Once a system like that is up and running, once people have learned how to use it, once mountains of data have been stored in it and processed by it, once customers are interacting with it, once processes have been re-engineered around it, once a myriad of apps have been made compatible with it, once the IT folks have learned to baby it along . . . Talk about being locked in!

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As Data Mobility Group nears the end of its sixth year in business, we look back with mixed feelings on what has been accomplished in the world of business. In our opinion, amazing technological achievements have been overshadowed by persistent personnel problems.

Ineffective people management and a lack of high-quality quantitative personnel insight continue to impair every aspect of business, from sales, marketing, and accounting to administration, engineering, and IT. These failings, combined with a misguided focus on technology, are a serious and sometimes fatal impediment to bottom- and top-line growth.

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Why “the Saltworks”?

Salt is essential for human survival and, according to Mark Kurlansky, the author of a fascinating book titled “Salt: A World History,” was one of the most sought after commodities in human history until about 100 years ago, when innovations in manufacturing and distribution drove the cost down—and the availability up—to a point where we can hardly imagine that salt once fueled wars and financed empires. Salt continues to serve us in more than 14,000 ways—most of which most of us are unaware of—including the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, soaps, water softeners, and textile dyes.

Similarly, the developed world has become inextricably dependent on technology for its survival and on a constant stream of new technology for its economic health. New technologies such as toilets and clocks were at first available only to a very few; it could take centuries before ordinary people could own such things. Today’s innovations in manufacturing and distribution fuel the almost instant commoditization of new technology, quickly giving computers, cell phones, and iPods the ubiquity of salt shakers.

Then there is salt’s broad metaphorical importance which Kurlansky attributes to its “ability to preserve food, to protect against decay, and sustain life.” According to Kurlansky, we associate it with such things as longevity, permanence, immutability, truth, wisdom, and protection from evil. We tend to revere technology in a similar fashion given how it has enhanced healthcare, education, science, digital preservation, social discourse and our standard of living.

Lastly, Kurlansky points out that salt is “a potent and dangerous substance that has to be handled with care.” History has shown that technology is no less dangerous in the wrong hands or the wrong circumstances.

To Data Mobility Group, the essential and virtually invisible technologies that surround and sustain us are the saltworks of modern civilization.