Week 10: Clear

           The concept I found most clear this week was the section in Chapter 10 of the textbook on Qualities of Valuable Information. There were seven qualities discussed that describe valuable information: accuracy, verifiability, timeliness, organization, accessibility, usefulness, and cost-effectiveness. Accurate information lacks errors and prevents incorrect decisions. Verifiable information can be backed up as either right or wrong. Timely information describes the fact that the value and time of information are for the most part inversely related (though this is not always the case). Organized information is arranged to meet the decision maker's needs. Different people may require a different organization of information. Accessible information is readily available so the decision maker does not have to wait for information. Useful information has meaning to the decision maker and may not be useful to everyone else. The audience is important to consider here. Lastly, cost-effective information provides higher value than costs to produce, and it should be reviewed occasionally to make sure it is still cost-effective to produce.
         These qualities are essential in the business environment because people make decisions daily using a variety of information. For example, on a single day a person might make a decision from a receipt, bank statement, pension plan summary, or credit report. As a student at the University of Florida, I might look at my grade report or degree audit to make a decision. In a business environment, a manager constantly makes decisions looking at sales trends, competitors' products or services, profitability across the different products, or employee skills. People want to make sound decisions off of valuable information, so it is vital that information meets these seven criteria to make that decision.
          Here is an article listing the top five qualities of good information as accuracy, completeness, relevance, timeliness, and clarity. Two of these precisely match the lesson from this week: accuracy and timeliness. Clarity is somewhat close to organization because information that is clear to a decision maker is arranged so it meets the decision makers needs and thus is clear. This is a random slide I found (clearly from a powerpoint slide for a class) listing the seven characteristics of valuable information as accuracy, completeness, economic factor, flexibility, relevance, simplicity, timeliness, and verifiability. This list matches this week's lesson with four of the qualities: accuracy, timeliness, verifiability and the economic factor (which is basically the same thing as cost-effectiveness). As I have noticed looking on the Internet, the list of qualities describing valuable information changes somewhat, but it seems that accuracy and timeliness are on most of the lists I discovered. Some of the other characteristics that differ are actually very similar but just use different wording.


Works Cited:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-Five-Qualities-of-Good-Information&id=3873113

http://www.jkang.com/CIS110/Lecture%20Notes/ch_01v4/tsld007.htm