Information Drought

"Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink."
- Samuel Coolidge, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

(The above verse is a sailor's lament that on the oceans, there is water all around, but none of it is drinkable).

In this post, I will argue that nowadays, one often experiences difficulty in obtaining useful and required information. This might seem contradictory to a previous post that argued on an overload of information, but I will explain why the ideas are complementary and not contradictory.

The problem lies not so much in a lack of information as to know exactly where to look for the information that is useful and reliable. For example, many a time I have waited for a colleague to send me important information on a new product, but am told, to my surprise, that he or she has already sent it to me - the information was buried in a long email, which I only scarcely glanced at, since 90% of the email was not in my job scope. So the information exists - but is only difficult to find. This is one of the reasons that search engines have begun to rule the internet. Google is the leading website on the web for a good reason - they provide web SEARCH, which is crucial to accurately locating the information that one requires.

"Data mining" is one of the fastest growing fields in software. As the name suggests, there is so much data recorded and available in organizations that relevant data needs to be "mined", much like gold being mined from deep within the earth!