When what info you want is not what they give you, in the office

We know that in large company and organization, we work with an enormous number of people as its employee. We can find good things and less good things in it,as usual. Today, I just found something that is quite funny and rhetoric in daily life in an office.

Yesterday, our division--got an email,which is forwarded from head office. In this email, we were asked to get some data about several companies in our city that can be targeted for our business. The data requested are address,account number(indicating that they are our customers or not), and acquisition progress.They do that to be able to map the targeted customers throughout the nation.

Usually large companies/organization, almost every employee is provided by on-line internal database that can be used to obtain customer's certain data. In this case, I assume they can do the same thing as I can-- obtaining customer's data from the database. Now,considering that that request can be done by people from head office as well as we can, why don't they take the data available from the database?

So, my supervisor lightly recommend me to give the data available from our customer database. I guess that our teammates should have specify more clearly about the data they request us to search. If they want an update of the data,(which is not available in our customer database) then say so. Given enough time, we will do our best to deliver the request, as great teamwork is necessary.

Has it ever happen in your life?