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Solving the Information Management Puzzle
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Solving the Information Management Puzzle
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What the IT Industry Has Never Understood |
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What the IT Industry Has Never Understood
Standard practice information technology is simply bad information management. Preoccupied with how technology works the IT industry assumes wihtout question ... or evidence ... that standard practice IT is good information management. It is not! We feel the pain but don't easily see the cause because success is measured by how we use technology, not by how we use information (like judging a house by how we use a saw instead of by how we use lumber). Familiar products and practices such as databases, accounting systems, requirements definitions, normalization, enterprise modeling, operating systems, word processing, ERP, CRM, SAP, etc. all impose severe (and completely unnecessary) limitations on information. While providing specific but very limited results, pursuing any of these as our means, methods, and goals guarantees bad information management. The IT standard of self-imposing naively unrecognized limitations on information is why IT costs so much, requires so many people, and why it is so hard to predict and manage. |
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Learning to Think about Information
Most of what most IT people think and talk about has nothing to do qith effective information management. Favorite topics, products and practices either obstruct effective information management or distract us from it. Understanding technology does absolutely nothing to help us understand information. The assumption that it does obstructs real comprehension. |
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Setting a Real Information Management Standard
Changing criteria for systems from how well we use technology to how well we use information. |
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Understanding How Information Works
How information fits the real world instead of how it fits into a computer. |
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Managing Information to its Full Potential
Fitting technology to how information works instead of force-fitting information to how technology works. |
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When Information Is (Finally) More Important than Technology
Solving all information management problems for all circumstances once and for all. |
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What the IT Industry Has Never understood
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Standard practice Information Technology is simply bad information management. |
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Preoccupied by how technology works the IT industry has never developed practical knowledge of how information works, assuming without question ... or evidence ... that standard practice IT is good information management. It is not!
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Skill with information has never been a requirement for planning information systems. |
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Knowledge of information is so poorly developed that by the time we decide upon legacy systems such as accounting , inventory, and payroll, or more recent solutions like ERP, CRM, and SAP, we have already committed to managing information badly and don't know it. |
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Thinking About Information
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Most of what most IT people think and talk about has nothing to do with managing information. Understanding technology does nothing to help us understand information. The assumption that it does obstructs real comprehension. Nor is understanding the information of a particular business the same as understanding how information works. Understanding information requires distinguishing between artificial technical thinking and real informational thinking. It requires knowing the difference between using data, using information, and using technology. Data and information are most definitely not the same thing yet conventional IT often gets side-tracked managing data instead of information and not recognizing the mistake. Conventional IT also routinely confuses expediting procedures instead of functions, achieving little-picture goals in violation of big-picture purpose, and tying systems to limited results that deny the capability to achieve equally vaild alternative results from the same information. When any of these perspectives fail, bad information management results.
Understanding technology or the information of a specific business, and understanding how information works require completely separate and distinct perspectives, skills, and knowledge.
Replacing 'artificial,' technical thinking with 'real,' informational thinking. |
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Setting A Standard for Managing Information
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No company should ever pay for the same information or information function more than once. Conventional systems require business to buy the same information functions over and over again, often within the same system, while other information functions have never been addressed by any system.
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Understanding Information
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Understanding technology does nothing to help us understand information. The assumption that is does obstructs real comprehension. Skill with information has never been a requirement for planning information systems. The development of systems relies on the presumption of knowledge the IT industry has never developed. When information topography or mechanics are not properly accomodated the reusl is bad information management.
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Information Topography
What we need to know about to know about any/every business or situation. Understanding information contexts, occurrences, facts, and origins, and the differences between determinant and deriveable, objective and subjective, and lingusitic and non-linguisitc information.
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Information Mechanics
Structural and organizational requirements for deriving new information (the knowable) from existing information (the known). Understanding the four dimensions of information, information vectors, information supercession, delta computation, and the critical aspects of properly handling primary, secondary, and collateral information..
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Managing Information to its Full Potential
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Effective information management requires the proper application of the rules of information topography and mechanics
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Information Cartography
Mapping the Information content of a busines ... identiying what we need to know about for a specifc business or situation.
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Information Engines
Computerized tools that have everything we can do with information already built in allowing for the creations of complex information systems with no software development.
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When Information is Finally More Important than Technology
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Short Term Benefits |
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The Inevitable Future of IT |
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What the IT Industry
Has Never Understood
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Standard practice Information Technology is simply bad information management. |
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Preoccupied by how technology works the IT industry has never developed practical knowledge of how information works, assuming without question ... or evidence ... that standard practice IT is good information management. It is not! |
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Well over half of information management costs are due,
not to how we use computers, but to how
we fail to use information. |
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We feel the pain but don't easily see the cause because success is measured by how we use technology, not by how we use information (like judging a house by how we use a saw instead of by how we use lumber). |
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Assuming knowledge of information we have never developed, we plan poor information management and don't know it, perpetually reinventing half-measure solutions for some information functions while others have never been addressed. |
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Systems provide the least informational benefits ... the least business benefits ... at the highest cost.
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Understanding technology does nothing to help us understand information. The assumption that it does obstructs real comprehension. |
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Some fifty years after the introduction of computers information concepts and practices are still based on and assume pre-computer pencil and paper technology. Systems and tools automate pencil and paper and their limitations, not information. Both Information and computers are badly underutilized. |
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By the time we decide on a conventional system, we have already committed to managing information badly. |
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No system has ever required we invent a new way to use information. Though information is unique to a particular situation, the same information usages apply to all situations.
'Naming' usage is 'naming' usage whether people or parts.
An 'average' is an 'average' be it batting or grade point.
All 'systems' are functionally identical. The difference between one situation and another does not lie in the apparent uniqueness of information, but in how many of which information usages (functions) it takes to inform a situation.
Just as all houses are functionally identical with the
essential difference between one house and another
being how many of which functional components
(doors, windows, walls, ceilings, floors, etc.) are used.
Instead of providing maximum system benefits by planning open-ended information usage/function, familiar applications such as accounting, payroll, inventory, ERP, CRM, and SAP all apply some combination of the exact same information usages but, due to an endemic failure of concept and imagination, impose artificial limits on them to fit specific circumstances. This assures we never manage information to its full potential. Every system is a reinvention of universal information usages with business paying to do exactly what it has paid for before because the information, but not the usage, is different.
The conventional approach to systems is like buying
a new car every time we plan a different trip.
This is why information management costs so much, requires so many people and systems, is hard to manage, and why it never quite gets it right. It is why today's ballyhooed solution becomes tomorrow's vexing problem. |
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Solving the Information Management Puzzle |
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Making Information More
Important than Technology
By turning things around … by making technology fit how information works instead of perpetuating a tradition of force-fitting information to how technology works, we create information management that:
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Solves all information possibilities for all situations, once and for all |
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Is wholly independent of any "platform" (present and future) |
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Never becomes obsolete having the intrinsic ability to evolve and change as business and technology evolve and change |
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Replaces the traditional collection of separate, costly, high-maintenance, half-measure, non-integrated systems with a coherent, all-purpose meta-system. |
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Eliminates most of the activities and costs of conventional information management |
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Putting Technology in Its Proper Place
Turning information management right side up requires:
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Learning to Think about Information
Most of what most IT people think and talk about has little to do with information. It is based on 'artificial,' technical thinking instead of 'rea,l' informational thinking. It confuses managing data (arbitrary symbology) for managing information (meaning), puts process (what we do) over function (what we accomplish), pursues goals to the exclusion of purpose, and plans results that severely restrict capability. Thinking about technology and thinking about information are complementary but mutually exclusive mind-sets. Most of what most IT people think and talk about wouldn't be necessary oif we actually managed informationto it's full potential. Conventional IT is stuck in an artificial mind-set. Replacing "artificial," what-we-do-with-technology thinking with "real," what we could and should (but don't) accomplish with information thinking .
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Setting an information Management Standard
Because information is so poorly understood, the IT industry has never set a standard for what constitutes effective information management. |
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Understanding Information
No system has ever required we invent
a new way to use information. Even though information is unique, information usages are exactly the same in all situations. Conventional systems perpetually reinvent solutions for the same old usages but limits solution to the situation instead of the usage. Coupled with the fact that some of the most important usages never make it into systems results in severely restricted information management.
By solving information usages as they repeat
in all situations, we solve all systems at once.
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Information Topography
What we need to know about to know about something. All information systems are functionally identical. No 'system' has ever required we invent a new way to use information. All systems use information exactly the same. The difference between one 'system' and another is not in the information itself, but in how many of which information usages ... information functions ... are needed to inform a particular situation. Information topography identifies and organizes information functions ... something the IT industry has never done before. |
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Information Mechanics |
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Managing Information to Its full Potential
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Information Cartography
Mapping the information content of a business. |
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Information Engine
A computerized tool that has everything we can do with information already built in allowing for the creation of complex information systems with no software development. |
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The Key to the Information Management Store
Because information is so poorly understood system development has always been an exercise in reinventing new ways to solve the same old information usages because situations, but not information usages, are unique (like designing a new car every time we plan a different trip).
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No system has ever required we invent
a new way to use information. Information usages are exactly the same in all situations. |
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Information is unique to each situation; information usages are not! Though not all usages apply equally to all situations (a particular usage might be needed five times in one situation and not at all in another), from an information usage point of view all systems are functionally identical.
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By solving information usages as they repeat in all situations, we solve all systems at once. |
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Business uses its information as it needs, when it needs, without suffering software development. Neither business, nor information, nor systems are locked into the relative handful, costly-to-create, and inherently limited usages of situational solutions.
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There's Much More to
Information than Meets IT |
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Understanding technology does nothing to help us understand information. The assumption that it does obstructs real comprehension. |
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Solving the IT dilemma requires thinking about information without getting mind-stuck in techno-speak. By looking at information uncontaminated by the artificial demands of technology:
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We identify and eliminate standard practice but unrecognized information failures built into conventional IT |
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We solve all information usages for all situations instead of perpetually reinventing the half-measure solutions intrinsic to conventional systems |
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Systems are tailored to a situation by properly identifying what a business's information is instead of having to programmatically tell a computer what to do with it. (Conventional system development, with poorly developed concepts of applied information, never properly identifies information.) |
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Users get results by being able to use their information for all possibilities as needs arise instead of being limited to only those results we happen to think to program into a special case system. New results derive with no new software development whether or not a particular usage was anticipated within the situation. |
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Information is managed as part of a cohesive, congruent whole ... as part of a meta system ..., instead of being fragmented into piecemeal, limited information, situational systems (e.g. accounting, inventory, payroll, ERP, CRM, enterprise models, etc.) . |
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The need for fragmented, half-measure, limited information systems is eliminated (not the need for the results they provide but for the extraordinarily costly, clumsy, least benefits way of getting them). |
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The need to constantly develop and re-develop fragmented, half-measure, limited information computer systems is eliminated. |
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We finally fit technology to how information works instead of force-fitting information to the arbitrary clumsiness of how technology works. |
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By making information more important
than technology, we vastly improve
how we use both.
Information management budgets
are slashed
by more than half.
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For More (and better) Information Contact:
Dick From
Informationalist
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