Rice Bowls Full of Data

It's certainly been a while since I last posted something but, that's what happens when life and work get really busy. I've been trying to shoe-horn an Enterprise Information Management framework (MIKE 2.0) into a Command and Control (C2) environment. It's certainly been a challenge.

The first challenge I had to face was trying to convince a group of entities that there is a difference between information and data. More importantly, that information is more important than data; data management is a subset of information management, not the other way around. That position almost got me lynched. Some time last century when I was actually paying attention in an middle school science class, I learned that information was synthesized/derived from data and was easily interpreted by humans. Then in highschool, it became pretty obvious in that first computer science class that information needed to be decomposed into data so it could be manipulated and stored in a computer.

Simple, huh?

Apparently not.

As with most enterprise architectural conundrums, the problem was neither hardware or software, it was wetware. I dared move the rice-bowl of a 40-year-old empire that only cared for data and cared little about why. When dealing with this group, one observation that I made is that specialization impedes innovation. It may foster optimization but, there is just no room for travel outside of the pidgeon hole.