What’s the difference between data and information and when one turns into the other?
One of the data challenges taht organizations have to deal with is managing what has been collected, organizing it and making it available for analysis and decision making.
Like anything in the life of an organization, data has its own lifecycle, it becomes useful at some point, and it becomes obsolete at some point too.
It also needs access control so that only those who are allowed access it, it needs ownership, stewardship, storage management, archiving and data destruction policies, and of course – privacy control.
But I would say the major issue with handling the data is value creation.
Management needs information for decision making, and some info may be very, very valuable and the other not so much.
It’s also not a secret that senior management has short attention span, for obvious reasons. They need to process information quickly, and a lot of it. They need ability to drill down when needed, and as needed.
Otherwise too much information obfuscates the key elements of data, and – on the other hand – too little information leads to wrong conclusions.
And often managers are not even aware of what’s really available.
With the above in mind we can answer the question about the difference between the data and the information.
Data may by valuable or not so much, but when it’s clean, timely, traceable etc. – it becomes useful information.
In order to make your data useful, it needs to be well-organized, and to organize data the first question that needs to be answered is: how the information is used for decision making.
And this means taking to business, learning what are their typical questions that they are asking of the data.
This is when you create value with your data.