Answers and Questions

We are living in a time in which seemingly everything is driven by the need for answers. You may be saying, "So, what?" as you read this but the impression I have developed as I have moved through this time is that in many, if not most instances, this amounts to nothing more than "trivial pursuits." A quote found online recently sums it up perfectly:
"We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept." [Edward O. Wilson]

Unfortunately, though having answers readily available can get you around the game board ahead of everyone else, it can't necessarily produce the big win for a cooperative venture. I don't know what research exists on this subject, if any, but it seems to me that living in "the age of information" is vastly overrated. If you think it is good to have a library of information at your fingertips then you may want to think about some desireable properties of information, for example:

• Is it true?
• Is it accurate?
• Is it current?
• Is it useful?

A relatively recent recent development has been the creation of a new area of specialization around data quality. This is not a technical post, though, so I leave it up to the reader to go as deep as necessary. The point I would like to make is that the useful property trumps all the others.

The publicity that surrounded recent preseidential elections in the U.S. shows us that "information" need not be true or accurate or current in order to be useful. If nothing else, this should cause us to pause and consider our thirst for information.

The bottom line is that a command of facts is useless unless those facts enable us to accomplish something. This is the function of experience, education, training, practice... In truth, a person who commands an encyclopedia of facts and is fluent in acronymese (see previous post) may or may not be able to accomplish a goal. This is also why we tend to look for experience when we need help.

The catch is that a person who has no experience, training, or applicable knowledge has no way of recognizing experience that will be useful. This leads to insistence on things that may have little or no bearing on eventual achievement. For example, when we need a new roof on our house, we don't ask that the roofer have experience with a certain brand of shingle or a certain kind of fastener. We don't specify how the work will be done. We simply insist on straight lines and no leaks. It's inexplicably strange that we do not take the same approach to technology goals including those relating to information. Read some recent position descriptions or postings on Monster or Dice or CareerBuilder. They are chock full of brand names to the extent that the real goal is obscured.

The proof of my point is the extent to which the information management situation is becoming more complex, with dramatic increases in the amount of work and the specialization of that work. These increases in turn produce increases in costs. It's hard to point to achievements today. Micromanagement, based on a swarm of facts with no understanding produces a lot of activity and few results.