Infomation and Systems

 I have been reading about "systems" over the last few weeks and I started to wonder how Business Intelligence (BI) software might be used from a system perspective. I came up with three ways that I see BI software being used within an organization. First it can act as monitoring tool for a company's past actions to see if they have provided the desired results. Secondly,  it can provide predictive information that will help determine an entirely new course of action for the company. Thirdly, it can provide information about where the greatest source of leverage is within a company for changes. Those might be broken down as follows:

1.) Monitoring - operational, financial information
2.) Predictive - strategic,  budgeting, forecasting
3.) Leverage - metadata about the company as a system

The first two are pretty normal uses of BI software, but the third idea might be worth more thought.

Turning Information into Action

What do people actually do with information once they have it? If a user has run a report with the information they required how do they  use it and take action on it? For example, if you review a report of your companies account balances and find an error that shows an overstatement of revenue in a certain account, what would you do with the information? Probably one of the following actions:

1.) You could send the same information to someone else so that they can take action on it.  You can send it via email, print it out and carry it over to them personally, or call the person on the phone and relay the information verbally.

2.) You could drop everything you are currently doing and log into the accounting system and figure out what you need to do to make any changes.

3.) You might schedule time to work on the problem at a future date.

4.) You could question the validity of the information and review additional information in order to validate
why the number is what it is.

5.) You could ignore the information and take no action.

6.) Store the information for future reference.

Broadly here are the actions that one might take:

1.) Delegate

2.) Fix

3.) Schedule

4.) Analyze

5.) Ignore

6.) Store

So one of the interesting things to think about is how the information tools that you use enable or discourage those different types of actions. Different types of users are going to take different actions based on their role within an organization. Making it easy for people to act on information is critical to success in setting up any information architecture.

Welcome

Welcome to Intelligent Information Informs! My goal for this blog is to provide news, ideas, and thoughts on  what information is and how it's used in today's world. In our knowledge centric world understanding how information is created, used, stored and destroyed is more important than ever before. I work for a company called Wynne Systems that sells Business Intelligence software so I am knee deep in this subject everyday and I see the true value of many different aspects of information. Just remember - intelligent information informs and that's what my goal with this blog is.