Recently I was having a discussion about an article that mentioned IT is about managing data. Given the rest of this article I tend to agree with the writer (sorry I have lost the reference or else I would link to it from here) but a colleague of mine, Bill Barr, responded after reading the article quickly with the following:

I crisply remember being yelled at by a VP of Catalog Marketing many years ago. She, in complete frustration, yelled, “Don’t give me data, give me information! I need interpretation!”

My colleague Lance Kind quickly responded in his humorous and creative way:

This is along the lines of Spock explaining to Kirk in his coldly logical way,– ‘Every answer is a response, but not every response is an answer.’

Although it does have a taste of higher level wisdom which could be dismissed because it may not appear valuable to your world right away but then I started to think about it further. As a person who tends towards the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto to direct some decision making in software development it may be very important to understand.

If we dissect what was said by the VP of Catalog Marketing Bill was quoting it may become clearer. The first couple of questions I have are “what is data?” and “what is information?”. Here are their definitions:

data - a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn

information - a message received and understood

Although data may be important as a transitory artifact it does not seem to me valuable until it becomes information based on these definitions. This makes me think about our industry’s fetish with data management and is there a different way that we can look at it? I do have some strong opinions about the prevalent activity of managing data and ways that I have witnessed and participated in developing that may be better. But that will be for another blog entry or more in the future.

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