The present day globe generates and uses a truly astounding total of information, but it puts much less of a concentrate on context – to its very own detriment.
This sort of was the principle set forward by Simon Ratcliffe, principal specialist at Ensono, in his session at Computing‘s IT Leaders Forum very last year, centered on information system and literacy.
“Just one of the items we can be definitely particular about in the present day globe is that there is a ton of information, and we are all currently being driven toward making use of information to make our conclusions,” said Ratcliffe. But, he added, he’s “not actually a huge fan of information.” At the finish of the day, “it can be just a bunch of figures.” Making an attempt to use those people figures to make conclusions is really challenging what is important is information and facts, or information with context.
This is not just a semantic argument, he added: it can be about how we solution information and information and facts, and how we build knowledge inside of our organisations.
We talk about information all the time in the present day globe: information experts, main information officers, information lakes and information warehouses. But often, “we variety of miss out on the level,” and should go back to fundamentals to revise what we are actually wanting for.
For example, it is much too uncomplicated to finish up with figures without context. What is the amount? What does it necessarily mean? But give it context, and the information becomes information and facts: it tells us one thing. For example, the amount 5,000 signifies nothing at all on its very own. Add ‘feet’ and you out of the blue know the amount refers to length. Then you can apply other information and facts, or correlate it with other information inside of your organisation, to change information and facts into information.
“The very last piece of the puzzle [(knowledge)] is important, and regrettably I believe it can be the aspect that we really frequently are unsuccessful to unlock in our information techniques,” Ratcliffe added.
“If we can derive knowledge from our information, it provides price to our organisation. Until eventually that level it can be basically simple fact without interpretation.”
On-demand from customers video clips of the whole day – which includes bespoke investigation from Computing about information literacy and a case research about the use of information in a health care setting – can be found on the occasion site now.