Balancing your data diet
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Balancing your data diet A digestive system perspective offers useful insights into the design and use of management information systems
Philip Powell
almost infinite variety and variable quality and quantity. The extracted nutrients are also numerous, and flow to
The role of management information systems in turning data into information is not unlike an animal's digestive system which turns food into energy. Data is the 'rood" of the organization: without it the organization will wither and die. But the mere input of data into a system is not sufficient for the organization's suivival. Irrelevant or excess data can be likened to junk food, staiving the organization of the necessaty vitamins, minerals and trace elements and leading to an inefficient (perhaps even fat?) organization.
different bodily locations for immediate or later use.
Some of these outputs are in fact unwanted, in excess of the needs of the body. These are, however, still retained
unless radically purged - e.g. by exercise. The waste matter from the body is expelled at intervals, although it should be noted that the efficiency of the bodily system is not such that waste products are devoid of nutrients.
An information system is a system which takes in data as its input. The data is to some extent pre-masticated. Food is cooked to aid digestion and ease consumption, but the mastication process takes place in the mouth. Information systems are less omnivorous in their intakes. In order to make data acceptable to the system, it must be massaged and presented in an "appetising" way. Usually this wilt involve the transformation of external information back into data, since the system cannot cope with information. The organization is bombarded by pieces of information from internal and external sources.
Information processing or digestion? At the root level it is perhaps tautological to liken the digestive system to an information system, since both are
'systems".
As such they are essentially sets of
interrelated constituent parts, interconnected and performing some purpose. However, the similarity between the two systems goes further than this, and it is the purpose of this article to investigate those similarities and to examine the insights which such an allegory can highlight.
For instance, invoices received from suppliers are information. Unless both supplier and recipient are part ofaVAN (value-added data network), the information will be presented in physical form. This is inedible: it must be returned to its original form. This data is broken down
The cybernetics work of Wiener (1948), and the later application to management of these concepts by Beer (1959, 1972), obviously has relevance here. The crucial difference between this discussion and that presented here is the use of analogies. Cyberneticians would argue that, far from likening organizations to animals, they are
into its constituent data elements to allow storage in
digital form (assuming there is a computerized system).
indeed one and the same; and that hence one thi
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