Covering a Symantec survey of information management costs and practices, Joe McKendrick includes one very important conclusion that needs highlighting. This is the fact that not all information is equal: “Business must be able to separate useless data from valuable business information and protect it accordingly.”
Before the days when technology was everywhere, there wasn't such an issue with separating real information from noise. Anything recorded in a system went through a slow and expensive input process, so no one was likely to make a permanent, organized record of something ephemeral or irrelevant. Today we have the opposite problem. Everything arrives electronically, so it's easier to keep everything than separate the wheat from the chaff.
The problem is that enterprises wind up spending millions of dollars storing and churning through vast amounts of trash. It's as if they're trying to run the business in a factory where the floor is never swept and the garbage truck never comes. Talk about friction.
The answer may lie in one of McKendrick's other recent posts, where he looks at the growing need for “data scientists” in enterprises – people who can do this important separation activity in a complex, multi-dimensional data environment. But perhaps we need to go beyond that. We should be pressing to give everyone in an organization a basic understanding of data principles and values. They don't have to be statisticians or programmers – not full fledged data scientists, but data-aware individuals.
Enterprises hire financial specialists but that doesn't mean everyone else is excused knowing the difference between profit and loss. Similarly, we should require our people to make relevant judgements about information assets (and liabilities).
This wouldn't only make for a more efficient organization and lower operational costs, though these are valuable benefits. It would also give people an extra set of skills for understanding the business. By better understanding the role of the information in their domain, they gain a greater appreciation of the domain – and more power to perform well.
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