Dat Aware Not All
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News Story by Peter G.W. Keen NOVEMBER 17, 1997 - "Information" is increasingly a misleading and even damaging term. It lies behind the continuing fallacies that have driven fads, overexpectations and underdelivery on promises. The following are the main ones: 1) The information fallacy that almost destroyed the information systems field in the 1970s. That fallacy was that data is equivalent to information. The IS department - note the title that had replaced data processing as the organizational label for the "computer department" - assumed that its growing data resources constituted an inventory of value to managers. Instead, it largely created a data bureaucracy. 2) The knowledge fallacy that underlies many of the claims about the Internet, the Information Age, Information Society and the like. Here, the assumption is that information equals knowledge. No way. If that were so, we wouldn't be facing a continued crisis in our education system. We are an information-rich society, but are we really knowledge-rich? Does the wealth of the Internet as an information cornucopia in itself translate into knowledge? Of course not, whatever the wilder 'net denizens may hope. The emergence of knowledge management and data warehousing engenders the next dangerous notion: that knowledge equals action. All these fallacies come from thinking of information as a good in itself. IS looked at how to organize it. The Internet/intranet movement has worked to make it available. The data warehousing school makes it easy to access. They are all supply-side conceptions of the role of technology. They treat information as independent of people. Reading through about 200 articles and conference proceedings on data warehousing for a recent project, I was struck by how little they have to say about action - real people making real decisions to have real impact. They don't look at how those real people - not some abstraction we call "users" - become informed. Equally, there's plenty of talk in the groupware and workflow field about sharing information but relatively little about the reasons for sharing. Most of the impacts of technology on the basics of business and competition have been less about information than about coordination of logistics and the movement of information: point of sale and quick response, for example. ATMs, the exemplar of telecommunications in action, changed everyday life through service access; it's stretching matters to call this information technology. Data warehousing, a major step forward in enabling customer service, decision-making and planning, will succeed only if it pays attention to processes and people. Otherwise, all this new "knowledge" will sit in the warehouse unopened.
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Implementación de un Datawarehouse simple en ambientes con pocos datos. Muy util para las pequeñas y medianans empresas que buscan herramientas para explotar sus datos.
Transcript of Dat Aware Not All
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News Story by Peter G.W. Keen
NOVEMBER 17, 1997 -
"Information" is increasingly a misleading and even damaging term. It lies behind the continuing fallacies that have driven fads, overexpectations and underdelivery on promises. The following are the main ones:
1) The information fallacy that almost destroyed the information systems field in the 1970s. That fallacy was that data is equivalent to information. The IS department - note the title that had replaced data processing as the organizational label for the "computer department" - assumed that its growing data resources constituted an inventory of value to managers. Instead, it largely created a data bureaucracy.
2) The knowledge fallacy that underlies many of the claims about the Internet, the Information Age, Information Society and the like. Here, the assumption is that information equals knowledge. No way. If that were so, we wouldn't be facing a continued crisis in our education system. We are an information-rich society, but are we really knowledge-rich? Does the wealth of the Internet as an information cornucopia in itself translate into knowledge? Of course not, whatever the wilder 'net denizens may hope.
The emergence of knowledge management and data warehousing engenders the next dangerous notion: that knowledge equals action.
All these fallacies come from thinking of information as a good in itself. IS looked at how to organize it. The Internet/intranet movement has worked to make it available. The data warehousing school makes it easy to access. They are all supply-side conceptions of the role of technology. They treat information as independent of people. Reading through about 200 articles and conference proceedings on data warehousing for a recent project, I was struck by how little they have to say about action - real people making real decisions to have real impact. They don't look at how those real people - not some abstraction we call "users" - become informed. Equally, there's plenty of talk in the groupware and workflow field about sharing information but relatively little about the reasons for sharing.
Most of the impacts of technology on the basics of business and competition have been less about information than about coordination of logistics and the movement of information: point of sale and quick response, for example. ATMs, the exemplar of telecommunications in action, changed everyday life through service access; it's stretching matters to call this information technology. Data warehousing, a major step forward in enabling customer service, decision-making and planning, will succeed only if it pays attention to processes and people. Otherwise, all this new "knowledge" will sit in the warehouse unopened.
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Think about your own firm. If a magic fairy instantly gave you absolutely all the information resources the company would ever need, do you think people would instantly know what to do with it and how to use it well? If not, why isn't education and support the largest part of your data warehousing budget?
Substitute for "information technology" a phrase such as "coordination technology," "business technology," "collaboration technology" or "learning technology" and you have a different focus - one that begins with people, not the information supply and its organization. In my readings on data warehousing, I felt my age. It was the decision-support systems (DSS) literature of the 1970s all over again. The DSS movement began with a strong focus on decision makers and decision processes; that's what made it the new mainstream. It lost that focus as PCs, spreadsheets and GUIs moved center stage. As a colleague who was a leader in the DSS field ruefully commented years later, we lost the "D" in DSS. The system, not decision and support, became the focus. The data warehousing and knowledge management fields are rediscovering too little and too late what the early DSS field knew: It's information use, not information supply, that we need to address and encourage.
Data supply doesn't create information. Information doesn't lead automatically to knowledge. Knowledge doesn't lead directly to action. Business action and impact are the goal. There's a distinct danger of the data warehousing and knowledge management fields overlooking this. Start with the people and their work, not the information.
