His wealth of general information is amazing.
Data - individual facts, statistics, a body of facts
Information - knowledge communicated or knowledge gained concerning a fact
Based on what I read, I honestly cannot understand how INFORMATION got lumped in to the definition of DATA. DATA is the item, INFORMATION is the application, context and knowledge gained.
Let's look at it from a "problem solving" standpoint.
Suppose I provide the following following numbers:
16 100 200 30000 65000 60 70 80
What is that? Easy. Data. It's a body of facts (I'll explain in a moment). There's no INFORMATION here, no knowledge communicated or received, nothing gained through study or research. It's just data.
But what data is it? What if I told you that the numbers above represented ME? Let me explain - when my daughter was 16 years old, we had saved $30,000 for her college. It cost approximately $65,000 to send her to in-state, public school, and we were placing $200 per month in the plan. When she was ready, we would have about 60% of her college costs saved.
You may be thinking, that's just data and context. You're right. Adding context communicates detail about the facts. Context and data - that's INFORMATION - that's knowledge communicated based on facts - based on DATA. See the difference?
But wait ... I've forgotten to explain 3 numbers ... 100 70 80. What are those? They're DATA. But more. Those numbers are PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS.
100 represents an additional dollar amount to save for college above the current $200.
70 represents the percentage of college costs banked with the change - not 60%.
80 represents a percent chance, if you were a financial advisor to glean that share of wallet.
Predictive Analytics can provide new, different, forward-thinking understanding and potential future possibilities and outcomes, but we need the right data, the right context, the right questions, to produce the right forward-looking information.
Next time you hear someone speak about data and information, remember that there's a BIG DIFFERENCE between the two, and chuckle to yourself when the terms are interchanged - because they are not the same.
