'Data' and 'Information' Are Two Different Things
All successful organizations understand this, but the Federal government does not...and it is resulting in tens of billions of wasted American taxpayer dollars every year.
Data is a collection of values. Data is a giant bucket full of letters, numbers, and symbols. Data, by itself, is useless.
The folks at Paycom seemed to understand this. Here’s a screenshot from a great commercial they ran a few years back:
These poor office workers are literally up to their waists in ‘data’ – just a bunch of meaningless, unmanaged values, slowing down their jobs and making their lives miserable.
Any organization can create an enormous amount of useless data. But if you put that data into context it becomes ‘information’ - and that gives it value.
This is what Paycom wanted you to pay them to do: pour your useless data into their solution so you can use it to create valuable information:
Here’s another example. Everyone over 25 or so will recognize this image:
This is data representing The Matrix from the movie of the same name. This data makes no sense to all but a few characters in the movie. But it is the movie’s lead character, Neo, who can put this data into context in ways that no one else can, ultimately leading to the defeat of the Enemies of Truth who run The Matrix.
Turning data into information is Neo’s superpower.
So ‘data’ and ‘information’ are two related, but different things. But if that’s true, why does an organization as powerful as the US Federal government not seem to understand that? And why did the National Archives and Records Administration say this in their Cognitive Technologies White Paper released in October 2020:
“Records management governance for data is codified in 44 U.S.C. Chapter 33, Section 3301, which states that federal records include “all recorded information” regardless of form or characteristics. The term “data”, as defined by 44 U.S.C Chapter 35, Section 3502, means recorded information, regardless of form.”
Think conflating ‘data’ and ‘information’ doesn’t cause problems? Consider this. All US Federal government agencies have an Agency Records Manager. He or she is in charge of the program that manages the lifecycle of agency records. By definition, ‘records’ include “all recorded information”, so an agency’s records management program is responsible for managing the agency’s information.
But now, thanks to the OPEN Government Data Act, each agency is assigned a Chief Data Officer, who is charged with leading a massive new internal bureaucracy “responsible for lifecycle data management”.
If ‘data’ is defined by the Federal government as “recorded information”, how does the Chief Data Officer’s responsibility for managing the lifecycle of data not directly overlap the Agency Records Manager’s responsibility for managing the lifecycle of agency records?
The truth is, thanks to conflation of the words ‘data’ and ‘information’, the responsibilities of the Agency Records Manager and the Chief Data Officer are exactly the same and every agency in the Federal government now has two enormous bureaucracies charged with managing the lifecycle of government information. This overlap results in conflicts with agency information management responsibilities that have made progress in managing the lifecycle of any agency information virtually impossible and significantly undermines the reliability of the agency’s records management program.
Since the early 2000s when the Federal government first began transitioning from paper-based recorded information to records maintained throughout their lifecycle (creation, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposition) in digital formats, the government has spent tens of billions - possibly hundreds of billions - of dollars on electronic agency records management, with almost nothing to show for it.
With the implementation of the OPEN Government Data Act in 2018, there is now a parallel bureaucracy meant to duplicate exactly what agency records management programs are tasked to do. They have already spent tens of billions of dollars in this effort and, like agency records management, have produced nothing of value.
These two bureaucracies, functioning at every agency and department in the government, have wasted an unimaginable amount of the American public’s hard earned tax dollars. Eliminating one, and comprehensively reforming the other, would not only significantly reduce government waste, it would also restore the accountability and transparency our government has lacked for nearly two decades.
It would sure be great to know what Elon Musk and his team at DOGE would have to say about this…