It's Only Useful if 'They' Say it Is – Part I

Social psychologists estimate that anywhere from 40-to-60 percent of intended meaning is lost during the communication process. If you take this and factor in that 75% of the average person’s day is spent in some form of communication, be it speaking, writing or reading, then we have some very real lost productivity (not to mention potential consequences arising from misunderstandings).

If we look at communication, we can define it as the exchange of information for a purpose. To create a baseline of understanding about communication we need to define some base terms around the lifecycle of information.

Data: A term we often use, and misuse, is “data". It can be thought of as raw, unprocessed historical fact devoid of any biases or errors. Simply put, it is precisely what happened in the past.

In this respect, data is interesting because it is always historical. There is always a delay from occurrence to recognition so concepts like “real-time data acquisition” are a tad misleading because you are always collecting what happened in the past.

To counter this example, IT must understand what the business needs truly are and work from there. Decreasing acquisition times reaches a point of diminishing returns wherein each additional dollar spent results in incrementally fewer improvements in timing.

In other words, the faster you try to acquire data the more you will spend. Eventually, the costs become astronomical with little perceived improvement.

Noise: No matter how hard we may try, errors ranging from subtle to catastrophic will creep in to the process and this is what we term “noise”.

The accuracy of our senses and remote sensors, our mental state, processing algorithms, storage and retrieval are all opportunities for biases and errors to enter. Some people think themselves infallible. Let me tell you, human error creates a lot of problems and so does thinking that removing people from the equation will solve matters! The latter will not, it merely changes the potential and introduces new challenges.

In addition, there are two broad categories of noise. Intentional noise is purposefully injected into the environment to mislead. For example, a competitor may launch a disinformation campaign to throw off a competitor’s intelligence gathering activities or to identify the source of intelligence leakage.

Unintentional noise is, essentially, everything else. If someone misunderstands something and then reports the error as fact then this perpetuates the noise.

Content: Once we begin to manipulate data we are creating content. Essentially, data is theoretical as our very act of recognition can alter it. From a practical perspective, content is essentially comprised of data and noise. In some cases noise will be zero for all intents and purposes. In other cases there may be all noise and no data, which would indicate a falsehood.

Content as an intermediary phase between data and information is where groups attempting to deliver value to the consumer often stall. It is said that we are drowning in information but nothing can be farther from the truth. We are drowning in content.