Judith Hurwitz’s recent blog about IBM’s new “Information on Demand” initiative interested me greatly because the “information agenda” is something that has taken a lot of my time over the past few years.
I would just like to throw a couple of important points into the mix:
- Data <> Information Data is a pre-cursor of Information but too many organizations use the terms indiscriminately and wrongly believe them to be interchangeable. Information is created by the attribution of meaning to data, in context.
- “Information on demand” is likely to mislead/ disappoint IBM’s purchasers, hopeful that information can be miraculously and instantly provided from data queries. There is a cost (time, effort and resource) in creating and sustaining relevant information so “information on demand” is an unfortunate and anachronistic instance of the widespread technology “smoke and mirrors” of yesteryear.
Judith’s analysis shows that she understands the issues and I am very interested that her research has found many clients looking to leverage information, because I have devised the Effective Enterprise Framework™ to address the fundamental issues of managing information in a complex living system (aka the enterprise).
