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What is Information?

Executives and decision makers today are presented with a myriad of data points supposedly to help them or enable them to make more effective decisions. Good information allows you to make a valuable and high impact decision. But how do you know that you have good information vs. bad information vs. misinformation? Further how do you differentiate between Information and data? One widely accepted difference is that Information allows immediate decision making without needing further searching / integrating / co-relating of additional data. Data, on the other hand, is what is needed to create information, but by itself is not sufficient to make a decision. Hence, information is created when intelligence (person) is able to directly use the data within a specific context defined by the person seeking the information during a decision process. The semantics of the context setting activity can be viewed as being set by the question that the information seeker has. The most common purpose of information is to allow someone to make a decision that will impact their achieving a desired goal. For example, in the business realm, "our goal is to create shareholder value in our stock within certain constraints" could be an objective. Hence, good information for the decision makers of this enterprise, is any information that will enable decision making that leads to the achievement of this end goal. Lets now look at how we create good information. The best information is created by getting the most accurate answers to insightful questions. The value of the resulting information is directly proportional to the impact of the business decision that is enabled by it. In essence asking the right questions turns out to be the best driver at obtaining the highest value information. Therefore for us to get good information, we must all become very good at asking the right questions. If we ask the right questions, profits will follow. If we ask trivial questions, then the resulting information will have little impact on the business. Remember, the value of the information is directly proportional to the impact that the decision which the

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information enabled has on the corporation. For example, at the end of a quarter most industries are trying to optimize their revenue recognition activities. Hence, they are gathering data about many operational fulfillment tasks that ship products to their customers. However, for the CEO and CFO, the real information is the answers to the following three questions: how many billings have we recorded (revenue), how many bookings have we made (orders) and how many orders are on the books for the next quarter (backlog). This is high impact information because it will directly impact the earnings per share of the corporation and the forecasted earnings for the next quarter. Here are some statistics on the perception of executives on the information they received. Its based on the 2008 survey of 625 executives by business week.

This research shows that only about 22% of executives felt they had the right amount of information (pie chart). The bar graph further highlights the difficulty faced by todays exectives i.e. more than 60% of executives make gut based decisions more than 50% of the time. Another interesting fact that came out of this research was that 77% of the decision makers were "aware of the potential bad decision they were making due to insufficent information". This highlights the significant challenge that the decision makers are faced with today. Page 2 of 4

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This concept of viewing information as an answer to a question is simple yet powerful. Most of us spend our lives chasing facts and data, not information. For example, one can spend an entire day browsing data on the web and not make one key decision because you do not know the right question to answer. On the other hand, if you do know the right question to answer, the search engine model allows you to set the semantic context fairly easily. The operational sequence is question information decision. This is the operational decision triangle of power. In fact these key questions at multiple levels of the organization is a simple tool to ensure that the entire hierarchy is aligned and moving in the right direction. In other words the question that the first line management folks are trying to answer should be a "specific case" of what the "mid-management" is seeking which in turn is a "specific case" of what the "exec management" is seeking to answer. This "question to decision" sequence, can be a very effective tool that can be adopted by an enterprise to check and ensure this alignment across all levels. We can further this concept to impact of the decision made which can ultimately help us prioritize the question to be answered and hence the information. One way to describe "Information" could be as, the combination of right set of data, delivered through an effective medium, presented in an optimal way to enable an answer to the question at hand for the business role. To ensure that executives feel that they are getting the right amount of information, one has to understand both the key questions being asked by them and the right way (presentation, delivery, frequency etc) to deliver that information to them. At an executive level, it can be argued that opening an application (say a browser and then a URL) logging in and then locating the desired information may be too many steps and may deter the adoption. Also, given that there may be multiple places to get information from, in the organization, the medium needs to be able to communicate with multiple sources and give information to the business user in a nice collated form. Enterprise level framework, which allows mesh-ups of data from multiple sources to produce useful information, allows interactivity between these different sources (changing say Quarter on one sub part, changes the information on a different sub part reflecting the same Quarter everywhere) and delivers it through either a browser, or through an always on" widget on the desktop or a PDA.

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In summary, the right decision, by the right person at the right time is the oil for a smoothly running organization. Information is the most accurate answers to questions. If the output from the computer does not answer a key question for you then it is data but not information. Hence, it is the skill of articulating the right set of questions to achieve your goals that today's decision makers should be focused on.

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