The remedy

  • Know what are talking about. Enable diversity and multiple perspectives.
  • Make information accountable
  • Work in the Open (=Open Source)
  • Protect Data Integrity (=Security)
  • Respect Individual Freedom and Personal Privacy
  • Enable diversity, be prepared for the unknown.
  • Establish Trust

Here are four principles of information management that are going to be developed in the next section of this book.

  1. Regain control: Managing information is driven by information content, not by the formats on which it is stored or the tools that are used to create or edit it. Executives should be back in control of their information. Complex problems can be addressed, and managed.

  2. Be accountable: Information transactions should be kept accountable, in the same way that financial transactions are necessarily accountable. There should be a way to analyze where an information comes from, whether it has been modified, how it has been accessed. Accountability is a condition to establish trust. If information has any value, it has to be trusted.

  3. Enable diversity: Different people may need to access information in different ways. Editors for example see information differently from readers. In a company, executives may want to have a higher level view than managers. Technicians need to access information at a more granular level. Some information considered confidential may be hidden to non-authorized users. Therefore multiple views should be possible. It is also possible to qualify information with different semantics, instead of imposing a unify world view, depending on multiple usages.

  4. Connect to the unknown: It is impossible to preview how information will look like in the future, and more specifically what the content will look like. It is therefore important to design information systems which are sufficiently open to accept to render information in a way that was not planned for at the time the system was designed. Interoperability and gateways matter.