The importance of information

In a recent post on The Content Economy they refer to Majid Abai’s analogy about information strategy. As we have written many times in this blog, it is very important to stream line all information and keep up with what is going on in the enterprise, hence things such as social networks and wikis. These things can also represent consistency of data collection throughout the enterprise and minimize the information lost.

Majid Abai gave this analogy:

"As an analogy, one could compare information in an organization to water in a typical metropolis. In the old days, as people built a house, they’d also dig a well in their backyard to reach water needed for drinking, cooking or cleaning. This water was hardly shared and was not necessarily clean...//...as people matured in the art of city planning, we learned to think of water as a common utility and to integrate, clean, and distribute it from a central organization in the metropolis.""You might say that we, as the residents of a metropolis, have an unsigned contract with our metropolitan water department to provide us with clean, consistent, and timely water. Basically, regardless of where you are in the metropolis, you can trust that the water is consistent, has met certain level of quality, and if you open the faucet, it will flow."

"The same applies to information in the organization. By implementing the same principles as our city planners, we’d be able to capture, integrate, and cleanse the information in a central repository, and to deliver it to our internal and external users in a clean, consistent, and timely manner."