I was jotting down ideas on the various aspects of Information that a business has to deal with. Not all of them are relevant to all businesses. However, as I was thinking about Information, I was amazed by the number of attributes and activities related to information. Here is a list.

1. Gathering – Identifying the Right Sources
2. Finding – Search and Other tools
3. Aggregating
4. Validating – Verifying the authenticity and sources
5. Deduplicating – Enormous overload occurs due to slightly modified versions of Information occurring over a period of time
6. Normalizing – Reducing it to some kind of canonical form (who are the players, what is happenings etc.)
7. Filtering – The essential tool to manage the overload and separate signal from noise. But the noise of one person may be the signal for another. So can we customize, individualize filters? What do we do with sediments left behind the filtering process?
8. Detecting patterns – occurrence patterns and source bias patterns and other cause-effect patterns
9. Classification – Topic Aggregation, Topic Similarity, Topic Hierarchy
10. Relating – independent, interdependent, co-occurrence and correlations
11. Analysis – contextual analysis, source context, use context, bias, analysis of language, overtones/undertones,
12. Synthesis – Making sense of different pieces of information
13. identifying Propagation Patterns – How does it propagate? What is the correlation of information paths to styles of information
14. Insights – Detecting trends, velocity and currency
15. Intelligence – Deriving actionable intelligence, mining, extracting facts, extracting entities, why/what/how/when/where analysis
16. Layering – how each layer maps to the organization’s layers?
17. Flow – An analysis of flow of information. Tracing information between people, teams, departments, up and down the organization. Also flows between an organization, its partners and customers.
18. Structuring - How do we link these different pieces – Unstructured, semi-structured and structured?
19. identifying barriers to use – stovepipes/silos, lost information
20. Supplementing/Augmenting Information – with annotations and collaborative editing
21. Visualizing – Different levels and types of visualization
22. Alerts and Notifications – Smart alerts/notifications based on analysis and detection of patterns and occurrence of events based on rules. Needed for both internal and external information.
23. Synchronizing – Updating internal information based on changes taking place external to the organization.

This is just a partial list. As the information increases dramatically, we need to think about these various aspects of Information and how we can leverage it to help an organization. What is your IIQ (Information Intelligence Quotient)?