Information vs. Intelligence

Information is factual. It is numbers, statistics, and scattered bits of data about people and companies and what they've been doing that seems to be of interest. Information often appears to be telling you something which in reality it's not. You can't make good decisions based on information no matter how accurate the information is, or no matter how comprehensive it is.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is a collection of information pieces which have been filtered, distilled, and analyzed. It has been turned into something that can be acted upon.

Intelligence is what managers need to make decisions, not information. Another term for intelligence is knowledge.

The United States is the most information-rich nation in the world. We have more information produced, more information stored, and more information flowing through our computers and networks than anywhere else in the world. This massive amount of facts makes us think that data is important. Indeed, we think we live in the information age, but we couldn't be more wrong. While that was true several years ago, it is no longer the case.

The company that knows how to turn information into intelligence will succeed, and those that don't--or which simply continue to rely on information as sources of inspiration--will fail.

Copyright © 2010 Larry Kahaner