January 15, 2010
In the analytics wars, one of the quasi-metaphysical topics I try to avoid is debating the distinctions between “information,” “intelligence,” and “insight.”
That’s about as academic a dispute as you can imagine. It’s not as if we’re discussing the physical distinctions between, say, gases, liquids, and solids. There is no magical phase-change where information--extracted from databases and contextualized into reports and graphs-- becomes the precious gem “intelligence” and catalyzes some alchemical reaction to produce “insight.” And let’s not even go into the corollary debate regarding what makes some insights more “actionable” than others.
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