Following the recent news about David Donatelli’s sudden defection from EMC to HP, blogging pundits jumped at the opportunity to debate the nature of non-compete agreements.

Over the past couple of days I have read more than a dozen blog entries on the topic, written by industry analysts and veterans, and [in my humble opinion] every last one of them - including StorageMojo’s own Robin Harris - completely missed the big picture. Read the rest of this entry »

More than four years have elapsed since I first wrote about what I called the Structured-Unstructured Information Continuum, and the Data-Information-Knowledge Continuum. Both articles described the nature of information and how humans consume it.

This is a long awaited discussion about the value of information. I shall cover the key points here and you are more than welcome to contact me to discuss the topic further.

The value of information is—and always will be—determined by outcomes. Information’s value is not intrinsic as some people seem to believe. Rather, its value is extrinsic and derived from its use or misuse as the case may be.

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Imagine accessing your iPod Touch or iPhone to check your email and finding not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of email folders—none of them yours.

Several questions race through your mind: Whose are they? How did they get here? Why are there so many? Why are they all empty? Why can’t I get rid of them?

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By now, most of us have experienced vendor “lock-in.” Cell phones sold at a discount in exchange for contract agreements that lock you in to the provider. PC applications that are a nuisance to put up with but would be an even bigger nuisance to switch. And—we all love this one, don’t we?—the surprisingly cheap printer that requires you to buy that company’s surprisingly expensive ink cartridges.

In the business world, we’ve got vendor lock-in and we’ve got it bad. We spend tens of thousands—or tens of millions—of dollars on a complex business system, by which I mean some combination of hardware, software, and business processes sufficiently embedded in the company’s day-to-day operations that it would be extremely painful, difficult, and costly to replace it. Think CRM, ERP, CMS, BI, ILM—the list goes on. Once a system like that is up and running, once people have learned how to use it, once mountains of data have been stored in it and processed by it, once customers are interacting with it, once processes have been re-engineered around it, once a myriad of apps have been made compatible with it, once the IT folks have learned to baby it along . . . Talk about being locked in!

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As Data Mobility Group nears the end of its sixth year in business, we look back with mixed feelings on what has been accomplished in the world of business. In our opinion, amazing technological achievements have been overshadowed by persistent personnel problems.

Ineffective people management and a lack of high-quality quantitative personnel insight continue to impair every aspect of business, from sales, marketing, and accounting to administration, engineering, and IT. These failings, combined with a misguided focus on technology, are a serious and sometimes fatal impediment to bottom- and top-line growth.

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Why “the Saltworks”?

Salt is essential for human survival and, according to Mark Kurlansky, the author of a fascinating book titled “Salt: A World History,” was one of the most sought after commodities in human history until about 100 years ago, when innovations in manufacturing and distribution drove the cost down—and the availability up—to a point where we can hardly imagine that salt once fueled wars and financed empires. Salt continues to serve us in more than 14,000 ways—most of which most of us are unaware of—including the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, soaps, water softeners, and textile dyes.

Similarly, the developed world has become inextricably dependent on technology for its survival and on a constant stream of new technology for its economic health. New technologies such as toilets and clocks were at first available only to a very few; it could take centuries before ordinary people could own such things. Today’s innovations in manufacturing and distribution fuel the almost instant commoditization of new technology, quickly giving computers, cell phones, and iPods the ubiquity of salt shakers.

Then there is salt’s broad metaphorical importance which Kurlansky attributes to its “ability to preserve food, to protect against decay, and sustain life.” According to Kurlansky, we associate it with such things as longevity, permanence, immutability, truth, wisdom, and protection from evil. We tend to revere technology in a similar fashion given how it has enhanced healthcare, education, science, digital preservation, social discourse and our standard of living.

Lastly, Kurlansky points out that salt is “a potent and dangerous substance that has to be handled with care.” History has shown that technology is no less dangerous in the wrong hands or the wrong circumstances.

To Data Mobility Group, the essential and virtually invisible technologies that surround and sustain us are the saltworks of modern civilization.

Yes, another continuum.

Last month I presented the “structured-unstructured information continuum”—a high level explanation of the nature of structure within information assets. In order to simplify the discussion and focus on one specific dimension—its structuredness—I chose to use the word “information” loosely as a surrogate for data, information, and knowledge.

Now, let’s discuss another dimension, value, in the context of a “data-information-knowledge continuum”.

Let’s kick things off with a few definitions. Over the years I have encountered dozens of definitions for “data”, “information”, and “knowledge”. As you might expect, the terms are used differently in the literature of different fields of study. It wasn’t until 1999 that I finally encountered a set of definitions created by Davenport and Prusak that had broad applicability.¹ And I’ve been using these definitions as a frame of reference and context for my discussions ever since.

Data

Data is an unprocessed representation of facts, concepts, or instructions in a formal manner suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing by human beings or by computers. In essence, data is the essential raw material for the creation of information. Data:

• is a set of discrete, objective facts about events
• provides no judgment or interpretation
• gives no sustainable basis for action
• cannot tell you what to do
• says nothing about its own importance or irrelevance

Information

Unlike data, information has meaning. Data becomes information when its creator adds meaning by placing it within some context in order to convey meaning to others. We transform data into information by adding value in various ways:

• Contextualised: we know for what purpose the data was gathered
• Categorized: we know the units of analysis of key components of the data
• Calculated: the data may have been analyzed mathmatically or statistically
• Corrected: errors have been removed from the data
• Condensed: the data may have been summarized in a more concise form

Knowledge

Knowledge derives from information as information derives from data. This transformation happens through such actions as:

• Comparison: how does information about this situation compare to other situations we have known?
• Consequences: what implications does the information have for decisions and actions?
• Connections: how does this bit of information relate to others?
• Conversation: what do others think about this information?

[Note: Why (re)introduce this continuum? For three reasons:

This discussion should help place things in perspective.]

¹Thomas H. Davenport and Prusak Laurence. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Harvard Business School Press, 1998

This post was originally published in Data Mobility Group’s first blog, “Perspectives on Storage”, on April 16th, 2004.

I’m not going to bore you with another introduction to Information Lifecycle Management. Odds are you’ve already read one of the dozens of articles that have appeared in major storage industry publications.

While the term Information Lifecycle Management is relatively new, many of the underlying concepts have been with us for quite some time. Most notable is the idea of managing information from inception to deletion, an idea central to the ILM philosophy, which has existed as part of the document/content/digital asset management¹ mantra for well over ten years. Read the rest of this entry »