This week’s episode of Conversations with Kip focuses on the portions of the IBM Historical Banking Movies that discuss sorting processes.  Sorting is still a very significant portion of structured data, ledger based processes.

Sorting is required because the random order in which transactions occur throughout some period of time (typically a day) has no relationship to how our records are organized. We organize records by customers, and vendors, and employees, and inventory, and accounts. Sorting is required in some way, shape or form, to match those transactions with the record order.

Sorting processes might be hidden in building an index in a database that then is read in indexed order to perform the posting process. But just because sorting is hidden does not mean it is unimportant. Ledger based processes have always sorted. Until we have such ubiquitous computing resources that we can afford the inefficiencies of doing all reporting from the transactions themselves, I’m quite sure sorting will continue to be part of them going forward.

Watch the video here. This playlist contains abridged and full length historical videos examples. This is episode 90 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is.