It is time to get this blog going. Before I spend time writing about how to make information more useful (i.e. solutions), I would like to capture some thoughts on the problems that cause information NOT to be useful (useless).
Here are five problems (please leave me a comment if you have some others):
#1 – Not Enough Information
In order for information to be useful, it must be complete enough to allow conclusions to be reached or decisions to be made. There are times when there just isn’t enough information available. Thankfully, this is rather rare in this day in age (unless we are doing new research). I won’t spend much time writing about this problem.
#2 – Information Overload
Information is not useful when there is so much of it that you can’t find what is really important in a given context. This is the complete inverse of problem #1, yet it has become a much bigger problem in the modern “internet age”. In fact, it has been said that information overload costs the economy $650 Billion per year.
The problem of information is a relatively recent phenomenon, but there were some that saw this coming. Here is a great 1971 quote from Herbert Simon that was recently discussed on the Knowledge Jolt With Jack weblog:
“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon, 1971, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, p 40-41.).”
Information Overload is a big problem for me and I plan to write quite a bit about it.
#3 – Poor Communication
Sometimes good information is available, but it is not communicated well and becomes useless as a result. This is a huge topic in itself, but I will simply define the problem of poor communication as “useless information that would have otherwise been useful, had it been communicated better”. I realize that definition doesn’t say a whole lot, but I’ll follow up with additional posts on this topic to break it down further.
#4 – Inaccessible Information
How many times have you been in a situation where you need some information to make a decision – and you know that this information exists – but you don’t have access to it? If information isn’t accessible to you, it isn’t useful.
#5 – Wrong Information
Information may sometimes have all the characteristics of useful information except for one thing – it’s FALSE! False information, or misinformation, is not useful because it is misleading. This can be the most dangerous because it may lead to bad decisions.
#6 – Incomplete or Irrelevant Information
Incomplete and Irrelevant information can be worse than no information. [NEEDS TO BE FINISHED]
