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"Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge comes from theory."
-- W. Edwards Deming
When Sir Isaac
Newton was conked on his head by the falling apple (as the story goes),
he had information. The information was, "apples fall from trees" or,
put more generically, "things fall to the earth."
However,
Newton still had no "knowledge."
Newton's
comprehension of the facts did not provide "knowledge" that would be
useful in any significant way. After all, people had known for centuries
that things fall to the earth and, if one didn't want them falling to
the earth, one must be certain that the objects are held securely in
their present location.
Once, however, Newton began to
construct "theory" around the fact that things fell to the earth,
valuable "knowledge" began to spring from the "information" at hand.
For
example, based on the "theory" that gravity was a force that always
acted in precisely the same way, experiments could be set up to measure
just how gravity functioned. From these experiments and calculations, we
now know that the gravity of the earth accelerates objects at ~ 32.2
feet per second-squared.
This
principle applies in business as well.
Having
worked in the world of business management and computers since the time
of the introduction of the personal computer (PC) in the early 1980s, I
have found that many, many business people -- from owners, to CEOs, to CFOs, to middle
managers, and on down the line -- confuse "information" with
"knowledge". In fact, a very common fallacy is the belief that more
"information" will lead to better management which will, in its turn,
lead to better results.
Therefore, organization spend a
considerable amount of some very limited resources
(namely, time, energy, and money) acquiring or
creating systems to give them more "information."
When
all is said and done, however, these business folks often are not
significantly better off than they were before they spent their precioustime, energy and money, simply because, like the
world before Newton, they have no "theory" by which to interpret the
information they have. Without this theoretical "framework" in which to
fit their body of information, many of their management actions are not
much more than flailing at the wind. Some of their efforts work and some
do not, but they generally cannot tell you (specifically or accurately)
why one initiative worked and another similar one failed.
There
are three required steps to gathering what one needs to take timely and
effective action:
1. One must take the data (the raw,
undigested facts -- perhaps line upon line of numbers) and convert the
data into "information."
2. "Information" is data
"digested" and put into a form (i.e., a chart, a graph, summed, analyzed
statistically) that allows the user to quickly assess the essential
implications of the underlying data.
3. The resulting
"information" must be placed into a theoretical context -- a "framework"
-- whereby the potential outcomes of any actions that might be
indicated by the information may be fully comprehended.
Without
these three steps, your organization may drown in data or become
infatuated with "information" and, yet, never be able to move
effectively when times are the most challenging.
©2008 Richard D. Cushing
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