Information Use It seems that information can make or break an organization. It can be sent through email, old fashioned paper documents or word of mouth. Information can produce important knowledge that can lead to responses that are necessary to realize whether a company is doing well or going down the drain. I hope to explain how information is used and how it flows through an organization well enough for you to understand within this paper. You can say that data and information do not have the same meaning although we use them interchangeably. When you receive data you have to put it through some steps in order for it to be considered information to be used by an organization or company. First you have to acquire the data. There are various ways to receive opinions of customers. This can be done by posting on social websites, emailing or having a customer respond to a survey after a telephone call with the corporation. After the data is received it has to be classified or identified. You can do this by choosing what types of data that needs to be classified such as account data, personal data or commercially valuable data. Another way to think of classifying data would be to have it broken into sections such as prohibited, restricted,00 confidential and unrestricted information. While classifying and identifying data it should meet certain confidentiality requirements. A plan must be put into place, maybe by a team, to sift through and find the desired data. The next step should be storage of the data. You definitely do not want just anyone to be able to access the data either. There should be a protocol set up so that only certain people can view all of the information. The first thing that needs to be done is to identify what information exists in your environment and who needs it and when. The reason for this is that not all data is equal. The security level of data storage can change over time as well. Files should have encryption when being transmitted through a network and third party email services should not be used. Although for unrestricted information it is not necessary. One of the main things about data storage is the economics of it. If you try to have a balanced use of storage space, it can save the organization money. In other words, there is no need to have all kinds of space that you are not using and still have to pay for it. Retrieval and editing of data should be next in the process. In order to retrieve and update or edit data, it should more than likely be in a table that can be sorted or edited. It should have separate columns and rows for all of the information that is pulled from the data. I am only thinking of Excel right now, but I am sure there are other programs that more security features that would be needed for sensitive information.
After verification of the data, it should be analyzed. Data analyzing is used to change raw data into information that can be used for decision making for test hypotheses or disproving theories. It is done with the hope of finding useful information that can suggest a conclusion and support opinions on what should be next within a corporation. There are many ways to analyze data, it all depends on what type of information that the organization is looking for.
Once the data has been analyzed the next step is to format the data for presentation. Qualitative and quantitative data can have various formats. For qualitative data you can use a format that summarizes the data by the evaluator or by a respondent quote. For quantitative data you can use text, tables, graphs or charts. You should find the best way to display the information so that anyone that is looking at it can understand.
Once the report is distributed, there should be an evaluation of the effectiveness of the report. In other words, discussions should be made so that it is known what should be done or not done within the organization. I think that once the information has gone through the steps that I have talked about above and distributed throughout an organization and to the appropriate people, they would speak to one another about what outcomes would happen if they took various different steps.
I have not worked within a company where data compilation was necessary, but, I think that I understand the concept of what data and information can be used for. It can let a company know if a person likes their products, or just the opposite. Data can have such a wide variety of effects on a company if it is used the right way. It also needs to be handled in the right way security wise as well. Hopefully, I have explained this in the right way so that it is easy to understand. I hope to learn more about the process through this class.