When you are invited to look at how an organisation copes with information, technology or anything in particular you have to start off by gathering the data to base an understanding of the organisation and its needs on.

There are a great many ways to gather data for business analysis. Many organisations have systems that hold the information and a lot of the time they are immature, fragmented and often stand alone sub systems (email archives, spreadsheets, single user databases, lists, word processing documents, slide shows, images and videos etc.). In many cases these systems duplicate each other, are redundant, incorrect, out of date and live in isolation.

Many times data may not even be recorded and has to be elicited through; interviews conversations workshops and even interrogation under torture. In these cases it has to be entered manually into a new data store and given time to grow and gradually become more complete and authoritative as more evidence is added.

The discoveries we seek need to be as dynamic as the source data: snapshots are not to be trusted. The data needs to be able to expand and be updated and update the conclusions it suggests; which in turn means it needs to be re-collected each time a question of it is asked. The self-same questions need to be asked repeatedly despite the subject being presented in an, as yet, unknown way.

Is this all sounding familiar? Not in the sense that, yes, we have all faced this problem in the past (most information workers will have) but familiar in the sense that; there is this mass of unstructured and ever changing information out there that is not just useful to us. it is critical. We use it all the time without giving a second thought. It contains all of the truths and all of the knowledge we need … yes the web. The need for distributed processing and shared data (the cloud) has already dealt technically with the challenges of the fact that the world of information is messy.

Semiotica

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