The information revolution ... and is it any use?

A news item from a client today referred to Burkina Faso – what is that? A country? A town? A person? – why not Google it she said, then rang off. The CIA web site flagged it as an African country – I later discovered it was Upper Volta – maybe they decided to re-brand after all the snide remarks down the years. Of course Googling – a name or term that itself didn’t exist a couple of years ago - immediately yields millions of references; sometimes too much information. A document from the IML Group referred to the too much information problem, a problem they had now solved by having a site where only the businesses or products you are actually after are turned up by their search. Another report from Accenture today of a survey conducted amongst a 1000 UK and USA managers reckons 53% of the information they gather actually has no value at all. It gets worse – they can’t easily get hold of the information they need, it is in too many places, others in the same company won’t share it, too much information making it hard to find what is needed … and so it goes on. One large corporate I worked for demanded masses of information all the time. Of course most of it was useless because people had to make up information to fill their report quotas. For the 5 year business plan one essential piece of information was the market share to 2 decimal places of our 3 biggest competitors – even the competitors didn’t know themselves, I know that because I called them up to ask. More recently a client appointed a high ticket marketing guru who wanted a complete audit trail tracking every marketing dollar invested to value of resulting sales. Not surprisingly their IT systems could not actually deliver this information. The data was all there somewhere, but on different systems. The effort in extracting, using and interpreting the data was hardly worth it – although it did confirm what we already knew. And that really is the issue – gathering information for its own sake can be a waste of resource – the big question we always ask is, so now you know the information you wanted, what are you going to do about it and does it help? If it does – good. If not then was it worth the effort?