The Sustainable Network

Chapter 24. Information Is King

women's soccer champion

I am building a fire, and every day I train I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.

— Mia Hamm

In this digitized information age, every project, every product, and every service is an information-based business opportunity. Those with better information will be better prepared to compete. Those able to effectively leverage information will be able to create differentiated value. Those able to correlate and analyze the ever-increasing amount of digitized data will be able to improve their strategic decision making. Those able to manage the extremely rich dataset now available will reduce business volatility by improving their forecasting abilities and identifying predictive trends, and then acting quickly upon them.

Today, information can be both incredibly useful and overwhelming. Too much information (or as someone might text: TMI) can overload and fragment an unprepared operation. How do you weed out the noise? Where do you find the most pertinent information? How do you make sure information is serving to add, not be a detriment to, overall productivity? The term data mining comes to mind as the refined process of seeking patterns in mounds of information, but I like it more because of the image it brings to mind of men blackened by coal dust with helpful lamps attached to their safety helmets. Individuals ...