The purpose of information and its three fundamental uses

We live in the information age – an era during which the defining characteristic is access to and control of information. And according to the World Economic Forum, we stand on the brink of a Fourth Industrial Revolution – a digital one.

In a business context, we’ve never collected more information or had more regulation around how and when we can do that.

But what is it all for? After decades of experience and as a chief information and chief technology officer, this is how I think about the purpose of information and its three fundamental uses.

The purpose of information

At its essence, information is an enabler. It needs to help a business achieve something.

Due to digital transformation, we can’t see all the information we’re storing; it’s no longer in filing cabinets and dedicated archive rooms, for example. But information is still information whether it’s stored on paper, on a machine, or in the cloud.

Because we can’t see it, it can be easy to set up systems which collect lots of information. But we need to be clear about its purpose before collecting and storing something which can have very real impacts. Recent examples such as Police Service Northern Ireland’s data breach which has the potential to put officers at risk of harm, and hacking of the Electoral Commission which may even undermine democracy, demonstrate the very real impacts.

According to Statista, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly. It was due to reach 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 and up to 2025, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.

That’s not only a lot of data to have to store, rationalise, and somehow use, data also has a carbon footprint to account for and becomes a risk if it’s not properly handled.

Fundamental uses of information

To make a start on rationalising the vast quantity of information your organisation holds, you need to be clear on how you’re going to use it.

In my view there are only three real purposes for information:

1.??????Record keeping

2.??????Decision-making

3.??????Action-taking

As the saying goes, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can collect and storge huge amounts of information, doesn’t mean you should. Information should be collected and used for one of those three reasons. If it doesn’t help you with any of them, you shouldn’t be collecting or storing it.

If it’s well-organised, and people understand what information is important and know how to manage it, information should drive business agility, performance, and better outcomes. But getting to that point requires a level of organisational information fitness? which needs to be understood and cultivated.

The difference between information and technology

When I was at university in the late 1980s, I did one of just two Information technology (IT) courses in the UK. IT was in its infancy, and advances in what was called computer science (which is what many of the other courses were about) were being made rapidly.

In the decades since, we’ve made even bigger leaps forward, but seem to have forgotten that information and technology are separate things.

We are the only species with the ability to get information out of our heads and put it elsewhere – whether that’s a drawing on a cave wall, in a book, or somewhere digital. This means others can build on that knowledge, which is one of the reasons humankind has been able to advance so quickly.

Organisations do the same things with information as humans do – collect it, share it, build on it. They are essentially organisms – made up of a vast array of interconnected systems, people, and structures. Making sure you have clear processes about why you’re collecting information and the purpose it will be used for is a shortcut to operating efficiently, and a step on the road to your organisation improving its information fitness.

If you need the information to take action, is it the right data to help you do that? If you intend to use the data to inform decision-making, is it reliable and does it give you the right level of detail on which to confidently make those choices?

There are also many external drivers for properly looking after your data and getting the most out of it, beyond the obvious risks of a data breach. Increasingly, how competent an organisation is when it comes to looking after data is evaluated by investors and as part of tender processes. Customers will judge your track record on keeping their data safe. And increasing use of the cloud to store data brings with it a parallel increase in risk. Being in good shape can have significant business benefits.

We have no shortage of technology to manage the information we hold. And technology is often the thing organisations focus on when trying to manage their information. With systems able to hold all the information we choose to keep, why would you rationalise it?

The key is to figure out the most useful information and know what to do with it. And that means you need to remember that information’s purpose is to enable – just because you can collect it, doesn’t mean you should.