Information or Knowledge? Are You Properly Utilizing Your Data?

As a basketball player, its always frustrating seeing someone buy the latest, most expensive basketball shoes only to use them for every day walking. I'm sure this can go for many other products, like consumers who buy the latest laptops for basic Microsoft Office. This is the result of following a trend, the hype, without understanding the root.

What I mean by this is that every trend starts for a particular purpose. Basketball shoes become popular and must have because of their feel, celebrity power, and efficacy on the court. The same goes for laptops. The computing power and speed become noteworthy. Subsequently word gets out and everyone wants one. Naturally, as I said earlier, you get those people who join the bandwagon not understanding what the purpose is.

I find that this is something we need to address in terms of Data. I remember a profound statement that my Market Research professor lectured about one day. What he said was, Data is information. Information is simply values, a fact. They are utterly meaningless and have no value unless they can be used for a certain action. Otherwise, we need to interpret data in order to create knowledge.

Knowledge is based on series of facts and patterns that our minds acknowledge. Data and information we receive from surveys is only of value if we can convert that information to knowledge.

With knowledge comes strategy and action. Make sure that you develop the knowledge.