Today’s information management tools look attractive and have a facade that makes them seem easy to use.
The problem is that most organizations really don’t know what they are doing with information inside these systems.
Information systems exist to help different functions do their jobs…
And while that may seem great, that is not the same thing as having an information management strategy that focuses on information strategy.
Information management is what powers every enterprise, and it has always been that way. Human survival depends on information processing and information management.
Technology enables humans to perform information management at a larger scale, but the basics of information management haven’t changed that much.
Something needs to be done. You use whatever information you have available at the time to make a decision on what to do. This can be a simple fight or flight response or it could be a multi-layered decision, the process is more or less the same. This decision gets exponentially more complicated depending on the number of people involved.
The decision making algorithm mixes all of the supposed “knowns”, “unknowns”, and the risks associated with each and comes up with some course of optimal action. Typically, this would be the option with the best most likely outcome. Or maybe it would be the choice with least likely bad outcome.
Unfortunately, in a lot of situations, you really can’t know in advance. So that leaves us in a really weird place with regard to how information helps us.
Information from the past is not necessarily predictive about the future, but making the same mistake more than once is not good either. Somehow, we need information from the past to guide us in the future, but that also allows for improvement.
