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Posted by Sherman Whipple on January 27, 2000 at 13:01:50:
In Reply to: Commercial Information posted by Rob Werth on January 27, 2000 at 09:01:13:
I agree. This is a very good topic, though in many respects it could lead us far afield from research. The reason for this is that if you take a close look at how information is acquired, distributed, and integrated within most US corporations and businesses you will find that, in spite of its importance, research, in all of its many forms, is the most seriously underutilized. Conversely, information sources which are either most suspect in their validity, or least relevant to the specific organization, often tend to be the most over utilized.
Even within organizations who have acquired very accurate and relevant research data, often at tremendous expense, the sheer mass of erroneous, inaccurate, or irrelevant information acquired at little or no cost, already in the hands and heads of managers and decision makers, often forms what I refer to as an information gridlock. Not only does this prevent the vital information, for which the company has paid dearly, from getting through to those who need to see it, but, in the context of a manager's knowledge base or responsibilities, it would appear to be less relevant than the irrelevant information he/she already has even if it did get through.
To compound this issue, each manager within each department for each division of an organization utilizes different, and often conflicting information resources. So here we often see one manager's irrelevant information in conflict with another manager's even more irrelevant data. Interestingly enough, this is the one place where we do find that independent research can successfully penetrate the gridlock to settle the dispute. Unfortunately, this most often occurs late in the game when the conflict has reached a crisis and the need for definitive information has become time critical.
This time critical issue has led many to opt for the services of consultants in lieu of definitive information. In fact, this has become the trend of the past decade. The issue is not cost but turn-around. Many organizations are willing to pay two to three times the cost of a research project to get an "expert" opinion today, than wait three to six weeks while a researcher conducts an accurate measurement and reports a finding of fact.
This reliance on "instant gratification of information needs" is particularly true of many of the mid-size high flying 90 day wonders in technology sectors. It is my opinion that this practice directly accounts for the incredibly high failure rate of these ventures. Having done a few information audits for these guys, I sometimes feel like shaking them and saying: "Think about it...you are breaking new ground... totally unexplored territory...You don't event know what is up ahead! What could possess you to believe that some analyst, who has never been there at all, can be trusted to tell you where to go? Would it not make more sense to send someone ahead (someone expendable) to scout out the territory and come back and give you accurate information?"
By now, you may suspect that this is something of a passion of mine. That would be an understatement. Addressing this issue is the primary focus of my business and the direction I have been pursuing ever since I began working with the organizational information infrastructure back around 1981, and began to define the 3x3 grid. The interesting part is that we do offer a solution, or to be more precise, a basic structure and process by which organizations, typically through a management consultant, can achieve their own solutions to information gridlock and begin to share relevant intelligence.
If you are interested, here is a link to one of the papers we have on our site which covers the application of the information infrastructure in the context of strategic planning:
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