Data -> Information -> Direction
Want a way to reclaim hours of your time spent in followup meetings and emails explaining the latest data that you sent around? It’s super easy:
Don’t send data to anyone. Ever.
Instead, send around your latest conclusions based on the data you have. Apply some of that good judgement that got you hired in the first place and turn the data into information. By anticipating the questions from those who aren’t immersed in your application or business or context, you can proactively answer them up front, and probably avoid several unproductive tangents in doing so.
Oh, and ever have a boss or colleague incorrectly infer something from some data they had available? It can result in hours or days of chasing a phantom problem or fixing something that’s not broken.
Thoughtful analysis turns data into information. Powerful stuff! Now don’t hate me; part of the information in your report is the data.
“Dang it, Marc. You’re contradicting yourself!”
Yes, but here’s the thing: by using judgement and analysis to provide context you’ve changed the data into information. Also, others will want to be able to follow your train of thought, verify your conclusions, and maybe even catch a mistake from time to time.
Now that you’re comfortable applying your expert analysis to the data to transform it into information, you can do the same thing to the information and turn it into direction. Here’s an example of what I mean:
- The Data
- Our webserver transaction measurement is at 80 per second.
- Analysis makes it Information
- Hrm, 6 months ago we were doing 20 per second and we thought we’d be at 35 per second around now, so we’ve seen more growth than we thought. Also, we have enough hardware to support 95 per second.
- More analysis makes it Direction
- After checking with the Bis Dev guy, I found out that we’ve just signed a deal to send most of our traffic to our new partner. So even though we’re approaching the capacity limits of our hardware, we should NOT purchase any more right now.
Turning data into information and then direction is a process that is vital to every successful organization.
