I am really on a kick about this ‘information’ is life thing, but it really rings true to me.
At the same time, we are terribly ill prepared to deal with it. We have programs, we have apps, we have dropboxes, we have drives (Google or One), but we still don’t do a great job of processing information.
Our minds are only good at processing so much information at a time.
Sometimes we are good at spotting the anomalies. Something doesn’t look right. This is kind of wired into our survivor.
As a species, we have always been information processors and information sharers up to a point. Share the right information to help our group survive and thrive. Don’t share the information with the wrong people.
That information behavior is very much ingrained in our nature. Organizations have multiple information incentives at work.
Information rivalries exist at the following levels:
Organization vs. organization
Department vs. department
Individual vs. individual
There are instances that even in the best case where information practices are not aligned. But it gets even worse, where our information processes have such wide variation. Variation in systems and variation in how the systems are used.
This variation in the use of the system makes effective information management particularly difficult. The promise of ‘big data’ is that it may normalize this noise with volume, but the downside is that averages are just averages and don’t account for events are the edges well.
But almost all of our information management software and training assume that everything has been normalized.
This faulty assumption is at the core of the challenges of information processing and parsing.
