ON THE PHENOMENON OF INFORMATION DILUTION

Abstract

Innovations in information technology (IT) have affected all aspects of modern life. The quantity of information available is increasing exponentially. Simultaneously, it is becoming much easier to access these vast amounts of information. Unfortunately, in some cases, this information explosion has also made it harder to get the relevant and accurate information needed for good decision-making. The present day transactional engines generate abundant information, but we still observe problems in decision-making at higher levels of management. There is a need to be wary of sub-optimal decisions based on information culled from the transactional level of management in addition to data quality problems that are inevitable due to the volume of data available. In spite of the tremendous increase in the available information for decision makers, some decisions at the strategic level turn out to be of poor quality. At the macro level, we find senior managers failing to seek answers for critical questions. At the micro level, we have not fully succeeded in monitoring the quality of the components that make the data-information-decision chain. In this paper, we analyze some of the factors that are responsible for this information dilution that is directly responsible for poor quality decision-making. We study the problem from both macro and micro perspectives and propose a domain specific approach to alleviate the problem.