Real
progress comes, not from
our experience, but from
overcoming our experience.
The costs,
confusion, frustration, and disappointment of
information management are due, not to how we
use technology, but to how we fail to use information.
Problems persist because knowledge of
information is poorly developed. It is
presumed, not educated. In consequence,
conventional products and
practices unwittingly
expedite information
problems instead of
solving them. Until we
understand and apply the rules of
'informability' that conventional
IT simply ignores, the high costs, confusion,
frustration, and
disappointment of information
management will not be resolved.
CINCAP
Services
Training
Understanding
information as a
discipline separate and
distinct from technology
requiring different
skills, knowledge, and
perspectives. Making what we
could and should
(but don't)
accomplish with
information more
important than
just using
computers.
Consulting
Advising/mentoring
organizations
and projects in
identifying and
solving
information
problems built
into
conventional IT
products and
practices.
Information
Audits
Audit
existing
and proposed
systems for
informational
lapses,
inadequacies,
and failures.
Strategic
Planning / Needs Analysis
Planning
effective
information
management based
on how
information
works instead of
how technology
works.
Solving
the Future
Managing
information
potential. Solving
evolving
compliance (e.g.
Sarbanes-Oxley) and
management
requirements
without having
to know what
they will be
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Contact:
With
almost
forty
years IT
experience,
I have
participated
in the
development
of
operating
software
and a
wide
variety
of end
user
applications
for a
variety
of
businesses
and
industries.
As IT
manager
I've
orchestrated
the
technical
infrastructure
and
applications
in
support
of broad
based
business
requirements.
Of
compelling
interest
to me is
not just
what we
do with
computers,
but what
doesn't
get done
and why.
Satisfying
my
curiosity
led to
the
recognition
that
information
management
problems
are not
about
how we
use
computers,
but
about
how we
fail to
use
information.
My
professional
experience
coupled
with my
academic
training
in
Anthropology
(understanding
contradictions
between
what
people
do, what
they
believe
they're
doing,
and what
they
actually
accomplish
...
confusion
intrinsic
to
information
technology),
provides
unique
insights
into a
self-perpetuating
conflict
between
what we
do with
computers
and what
we could
and
should
(but
don't) accomplish
with
information.
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Rethinking Information Systems and
Technology
What Conventional IT Leaves
Out:
(Errors of Omission)
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Expectations:
Raising the bar. Making what we
could and should (but don’t)
accomplish with information more
important than just using computers.
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The Necessary
Future of
Information Management
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Information
Imperatives: Information
realities ignored by conventional IT
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Where Conventional IT Fails
(Errors of Commission)
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Conventional Wisdom:
Conventional perspectives that focus on the wrong thing in the wrong way
at the wrong time
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Non-Information
Technology: Products and practices that have
nothing to do with managing information
(except to provide a distracting illusion
of information management)
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Anti-Information
Technology: Products and practices that limit,
diminish, and destroy more information
than they provide.
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Expectations:
Raising the bar. Making what we
could and should (but don’t)
accomplish with information more
important than just using computers.
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The Universal System
Requirement:
Managing Information to
its full potential:
To
develop and organize information so that
all information
put into a system is
available when needed for any
purpose to
which it could apply
(whether or not
particular usages
are foreseen when a
system us created)
This 'universal' requirement is inclusive
of all other information requirements; present
and future; foreseen and
unforeseen.
Systems failing this
requirement, fail information
management.
Managing information to its full
potential has never been the strategy,
tactic, purpose, or criteria for
'information' technology, allowing cyber-technology
to languish in a non-informational,
anti-informational quagmire.
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The Information Engine:
A
computerized tool that has everything we can do
with
information already built in
allowing for the creation
of complex
information systems with no
(additional)
software development
How we use information
doesn't change just because information
changes. New systems don't require
that we invent new ways to use
information. All systems are
functionally identical, the difference
between systems being, not what we do with
information, but in how many of which
information functions are needed to inform
a particular situation. By ignoring the
consistency of information function,
conventional system development is
essentially a perpetual exercise in
reinventing the wheel.
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Manage information as a cohesive
whole (instead of fragmenting it into
piecemeal systems), allowing
organizations to evolve to one
comprehensive, self-integrated system
inclusive of and tailored to each
business’s informational needs
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Create/update systems by simply
describing what a business’s
information is instead of programming
what a computer has to do to it (what a
computer has to do to it is already in
the information engine)
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Create systems that never become
obsolete, having the ability to evolve
and change as business and technology
evolve and change
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Cut information management costs by up
to eighty percent.
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Information Imperatives:
Information realities ignored by conventional IT
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Primary, Collateral, and Secondary
Information - the priorities and conditions for
how and when information comes into existence
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Primordial Information – the
fundamental view of information from which all other
views derive.
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Information Topography -
information as it fits the real world instead of as
distorted to fit specific but limited results,
self-limiting legacy practices, or into a computer.
The basis for describing what a
business's information is instead of
what a computer has to do to it.
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The Four Dimensions of Information -
overcoming the two-dimensional, row/column limitations
handed down from pencil and paper technology
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Information Vectors - the paths
and pre-conditions that must exist to derive new,
secondary information from primary and collateral
information
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Correlating Information - the
unifying superset of legacy, half-measure, relational
and hierarchical perspectives
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Conventional Wisdom (cw):
Conventional perspectives that focus on the wrong thing in the wrong way
at the wrong time
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Information vs. Technology
- the rules for using the raw material (the
information 'lumber') vs. the
rules for using the tool (the computer
'saw' - cw)
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Data vs. Information -
organizing
symbols (cw) vs. organizing meaning
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Design vs. Discovery –
deciding the vehicle without really understanding the
terrain (cw);
confusing trip, travel, transportation, and terrain
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Goals vs. Purpose -
winning the battle (cw) but losing the war
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Results vs. Capability - give
a man a fish and you feed him for a day (provide
results - cw) teach a man to fish a you feed him for a
lifetime (provide capability - multiplying the
possibilities and potential)
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Process vs. Function - improving
what
we do (cw) vs. improving what we accomplish by doing it
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Non-Information Technology:
Products and practices that have
nothing to do with managing information
(except to providing a distracting illusion
of information management)
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Operating Systems - helping us
use computers but not information
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Word Processing
- manipulating symbols but not meaning
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Internet - improving the delivery but not the message
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Anti-Information Technology:
Products and practices that limit,
diminish, and destroy more information
than they provide.
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Databases - Mimicking the
informational limitations inherent to pencil and paper
technology
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Accounting Systems - Six-hundred
year old practices designed specifically to compensate
for (and, when computerized, perpetuate) pencil and
paper limitations. We obviously need accounting
results, but computerizing pencil and
paper practices to get them automates
the limitations, not information.
When information is managed to its full
potential, accounting is a side-effect,
not a system.
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Requirements Definitions - False
specifications; limiting the size of the problem for
the benefit of system developers (and to the detriment
of business) thereby severely limiting the information
potential of systems. The
principle effect of requirements
definitions is to convince everyone to
at least limit and, often, to lower
their expectations.
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Normalization (3NF) - Planning
form
instead of function; organizing information to fit a
system instead of to fit the real world
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Application Systems (accounting,
inventory, contact managers, ERP, CRM, etc.)
- Providing the least benefit at the highest
cost by fragmenting information into piecemeal systems
(thereby setting information gaps, overlaps, and
contradictions as an information management standard)
the sum of which can never add up to an informational
whole. By
the time we have decided on a specific
application system we have unknowingly committed
to managing information poorly.
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Enterprise Modeling - Perpetuating poor information management by expediting
tactics and strategies evolved from the pre-computer
necessity to compensate for rather than solve
information problems
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