How to differentiate between data and information

The modern earth generates and takes advantage of a truly astounding amount of data, but it puts much less of a focus on context – to its personal detriment.

These types of was the theory set forward by Simon Ratcliffe, principal consultant at Ensono, in his session at Computing‘s IT Leaders Forum last calendar year, targeted on info strategy and literacy.

“Just one of the points we can be absolutely specified about in the modern-day earth is that there is a good deal of details, and we are all getting driven in the direction of working with knowledge to make our conclusions,” reported Ratcliffe. But, he added, he’s “not essentially a enormous enthusiast of information.” At the conclude of the day, “it’s just a bunch of figures.” Making an attempt to use all those figures to make conclusions is really tough what is crucial is facts, or knowledge with context.

This is not just a semantic argument, he extra: it is about how we approach knowledge and facts, and how we make wisdom inside our organisations.

We discuss about knowledge all the time in the contemporary earth: knowledge scientists, main facts officers, information lakes and details warehouses. But sometimes, “we type of miss the level,” and need to go back again to basic principles to revise what we are actually hunting for.

For instance, it is too straightforward to stop up with figures devoid of context. What is the amount? What does it indicate? But give it context, and the information turns into information: it tells us some thing. For example, the quantity 5,000 usually means nothing on its very own. Include ‘feet’ and you suddenly know the range refers to distance. Then you can use other facts, or correlate it with other knowledge within your organisation, to switch information into expertise.

“The past piece of the puzzle [(wisdom)] is vital, and unfortunately I think it can be the element that we really normally are unsuccessful to unlock in our facts procedures,” Ratcliffe included.

“If we can derive knowledge from our knowledge, it adds price to our organisation. Right up until that point it really is merely actuality with out interpretation.”

On-need movies of the complete day – which includes bespoke exploration from Computing about facts literacy and a circumstance study about the use of facts in a health care placing – can be identified on the event website now.