By MICHAEL STRAND

Salina Journal

Thanks to the Internet, people can do amazing things, like sit in a park on a spring day and monitor the tick-by-tick destruction of their retirement dreams, ignore a dinner companion as they track March Madness brackets, or nano-manage employees in the middle of the night.

But few people have access to the seductive amount of information available to Dan Mendicina, director of the Philips Lighting plant in Salina.

With a "dashboard" available on his computer at work, he can pull up a schematic view of the plant, shaded in colors ranging from green, through yellow, and to red -- indicating at a glance the status of each part of the production line.

With a quick move of the mouse, he can see that one glass tube line is working at 98.67 percent of capacity, and another at 98.82 percent, with similarly precise data available plantwide.

The dashboard also lets him zoom in on dozens of different spots in the process, giving him real-time information on glass breakage, the number of tubes that are failing quality control tests, whether a particular piece of equipment is down and so forth. He can even look at data from previous days, to compare it to what's happening in the plant now.

In some ways, the dashboard can tell him more about the plant's operation than he could glean while standing on the floor.

And he doesn't have to be in his office; the dashboard also is available on his laptop and smart phone.

"I've been in New Jersey, The Netherlands, China, and can see exactly what's happening in the plant," Mendicina said.

When he first obtained that kind of access to the plant's inner workings, "I used it a lot, partly because it was new -- like when you get a new car, you want to drive it even if you don't have anywhere to go," he said.

If he woke up in the middle of the night, he'd check the dashboard. On vacation? Check the dashboard.

"It can become an obsession," he said. "You can eat it and drink it -- and that's not good. It's like spending too much time on the Internet or with social networks -- any obsession is bad."

With computers, databases, smart machines, cell phones, text messaging and other tools, many of today's managers have more information at their fingertips than ever before.

And while more information can be better, Mendi-cina thinks it also can lead to information overload and make decisions unnecessarily difficult.

"There's such a thing as being 'information rich and data poor,' " Mendicina said. "If you're not using all those numbers to make a decision, what's the value? All that information can consume you."

So, too, can the feeling that if you can be connected to work 24/7, you should.

"I tell my staff, 'You have lives, too. I don't want you here 24/7, and I don't want you at home, when your wife is trying to talk to you, looking at a dashboard,' " he said.

Before long, Mendicina said, he began to realize that he was looking at the dashboard way more than necessary.

"Now, I might peek at it once or twice a weekend," he said. "If I look at it at 2 a.m. on a Saturday and something's red, they're already working on it -- that's why I have supervisors on the floor."

And if he takes a wee-hours peek at the dashboard, sees red -- and it's not being fixed, he said, he has far deeper problems than slowed production.

"You're only as good as the business is when you're gone," Mendicina said. "If you can't be gone for a week or two -- or a month -- without things falling apart, you're not doing a good job."

That doesn't mean he leaves work behind at the end of the day -- or even when he's on vacation.

"I can't just say I'll be gone for a week and I'm not taking my laptop," Mendi-cina said of vacations.

What he does, however, is strictly limit contact -- telling people he'll be available at a certain time for about an hour each day, "usually early in the morning or in the evening -- at a time that's convenient for my family, and that's when I'll be taking phone calls and checking e-mail. That usually works pretty well."

Dan Stutterheim, president of Kasa Companies, agreed the balance between work-life and life-life can be difficult to find, with texts and phone calls trying to demand immediate attention.

"My wife might say I still haven't," Stutterheim said.

He recently returned from a business trip to India -- where his cell phone didn't work, he said. He said that lack of connection had its positive points.

"It let me focus on what I was there to do," Stutterheim said.

He did have his laptop, so he could still check e-mail.

n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.