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How Do You Vet Your Information?
Not your data, your information. We’ve talked before in this space about data usage, how you manage data and such. But, I’ve been watching with interest as an interesting situation evolves with a certain GPS unit. We were on a family trek on the East Coast recently – using "Helga" – a Garmin GPS unit – to go from Williamsburg, VA to Poughkeepsie, NY. We entered in the address and off we went.
About an hour later, we were merrily driving on our way and realized that we weren’t going on a route that matched up with our Google routing, and in fact seemed to want to take us along the PA state border…. West. Hmmm…
Zoom out on the map… several times.
What should have been a fairly straight shot was magically transformed into a cross-country tour! Helga was taking us out, around the great lakes, up into Canada and back down into NY. Huh? No matter what we did, we couldn’t get the GPS to use the DATA correctly to get rational INFORMATION out of the system.
My family groaned when I exclaimed "There’s an editorial here!" 🙂
The editorial slant on this is that I’m sure the GPS *data* was decent – but the information out of it was not so hot. Our information systems are in this same boat. Lots of solid data in there, but using that information – and making sure that information is used, applied and interpreted correctly, is a huge challenge. It’s also one that’s growing daily.
So, how are you checking your information usage? I think this is a huge area for information management – whether you want to call it "Data Architect" or something else – it’s something that needs some serious attention and expertise…
Let me know how you approach this…
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