Dealing Effectively With Data
Section 2 Data Literacy
Data Literacy
Why Take a Class in Conducting Research?
As mentioned in the first chapter, this class is concerned with much more than
information that is exclusively located in the Library. The world of information and your
access to it is constantly changing.
A History of the Information Revolution
In history class you learned about the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. This
revolution drastically affected the lives of all the world’s citizens, particularly those in the
“western” world and colonies of those countries. Industrialization changed the means of
production from small more family owned businesses to large scale production of items
in a factory type setting. Countries that were not considered part of the West were also
affected as they provided the raw materials for the factories in the United States and
Europe. As you might expect, the industrial revolution was not without its own issues in
terms of inadequate redistribution of the profits generated by the industrialized factory
setting and the disruption to the traditional small scale family labor market. There was
certainly opposition to the Industrial Revolution, the most famous of which are termed
the Luddites. To make a long story short, the Luddites opposed the mechanization of the
textile industry. Many of the highly skilled textile workers lost their jobs with the advent
of the mechanization of this industry. Textile work which formerly had a high value with
associated training and apprenticeships was no longer a solid vocation. Anyone could be
employed to work in the textile factory.
Why do we care about this history lesson? Interestingly the term Luddites has carried
over to the current so called “Information Revolution” or “Information Age”. The term
Luddites over the past century has come to refer to people who are resistant to using
technology. While this is somewhat of the truth in describing the original movement
over a century ago, is doesn’t do justice to explaining the term in reference to its
changing the value of work or labor. The Luddites were the social victims of the
industrial revolution. You need to understand some of the core concepts of the current
“Information Revolution” to insure that you too don’t become a victim.
The proponents of the Information Revolution point to the vast amounts of data being
collected and transferred aournd the world. Economists often refer to this transfer of
information, jobs, and products as globalization. Yet, information transfer around the
world is nothing new. The ancient trade routes that merchants followed in the medieval
ages that run from areas whose names we have recently become familiar with, such as the
Kyber Pass, were much more than a simple transfer of goods. The merchants in their
travels to both the East and West transferred new ideas, theories, and knowledge to all
parts of the world.
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The Consumer Data Trail
So what’s the difference between now and then in terms of information? Why exactly
are we calling this the information revolution? People who write about information and
society today point to the expansive amounts of data being generated, gathered, and used
in decision making. Let’s take product purchasing as just one example. We’ll assume
that this past holiday season you ordered a cheese set from a mail order catalog for your
cousin or maybe sent them a book from an online vendor such as Amazon.com. Guess
what . . . Now you are sent product catalogs from your cheese vendor or Amazon every
two weeks. You’ve purchased once, so it’s a good bet from the company’s perspective
that you’ll buy from them again.
However, all of a sudden you start receiving catalogs from other vendors. Your mailbox
in filled with candy, fruitcake, clothing, and game catalogs. This didn’t happen by
accident. Your purchase of an item from the mail order catalog or online vendor was
valuable information. Your purchase helped the vendor make money and your shopping
preferences are also valuable information. The original vendor can sell your address and
shopping information to all the other candy, fruitcake, clothing, etc. vendors. Thus the
vendor generated the data by selling the product to you, gathered the data by entering you
(address, preferences, etc) into their database, and made the decision to sell your
information to another vendor and thus further increase their profit.
The Impact of the Globalization of Information
We saw earlier how the textile weavers lost their livelihoods to the industrial revolution.
We will spend the rest of the class discussing how to appropriately articulate, find, use,
and develop information for our benefit. However, I want to spend a moment describing
a couple of scenarios to show you how access to information through global
telecommunications networks (both data and voice) is already affecting the U.S. work
force.
We all receive those annoying telemarketing calls. (Newsflash: If you hate telemarketing
calls as much as I do, go to the New York State Attorney General’s web site and have
your phone number put officially on a “do not call list”. I went from 10 calls a day to one
every few weeks.) Do the people calling you typically sound like they’re from anywhere
in New York or the East coast? Eight times out of ten you notice that they sound like
they’re from the South. In fact, when you call an 800 number for customer service or
mail order vendors this also tends to be the case. Why do you suppose this is the case?
Are people from the South better at telemarketing or customer service on the phone? I
would suggest to you that the reason you have fewer telemarketers/customer service
people from the North has more to do with economics than phone skills. Take a look at
state employment and wage data and compare some of the Northern states with some of
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the Southern states. These jobs have moved South because the prevailing wage is lower.
The telecommunications structure means that from a telephone perspective there’s
probably not much difference in cost or voice clarity between a local call and one from
somewhere in the South, say Texas for example. However, the company can make up
their profit margin by paying less for the same work to an employee in many of the
Southern states.
Outsourcing Skilled Jobs
“So what”, you’re probably saying, “I have no desire to be a telemarketer”. “They can
move those lower skill jobs to the Southern United States and it won’t affect me at all”.
However, telemarketing and customer service relies on the “voice” part of the global
telecommunications structure. What about more complex jobs that rely on the “data
transfer” part of international telecommunications? Outsourcing is a common word in
business today. I’m sure you’ll discuss it more in your Human Resource Management
classes, but it basically means subcontracting out work to another company. For
Example, the food service at PSU is outsourced to Sodexho. The employees work for
Sodexho, not PSU. (I will mention that they are about the only employees on campus that
aren’t unionized and leave you to infer what this means. You’ll learn more when you take
the Labor Relations course.)
Who else at the university can be outsourced by using information technology? Is it only
the food service workers? Well, actually your professors could easily be in the position
of those “Luddite” textile workers. No, a machine won’t necessarily replace what we do.
However, by using the Internet one of your professors could theoretically (it’s possible
with distance education synchronous/asynchronous Internet technologies) be replaced by
a professor in another country. College professors in Mexico, for example, earn a
fraction of the salary of the average college professor in the United States.
The computer field is another prime example of an industry where global outsourcing is
quite feasible. The computing industry relies heavily on help desks to answer computer
purchaser questions. The software industry is highly reliant on programmers with
demand for people with the latest knowledge of Java, computer server software
platforms, and SQL. The universities in India are renowned for their training in computer
technologies. However, salaries for these highly skilled programmers and technical
service people in India are considerably lower than in the United States. Many U.S.
companies have moved their data operations to India to take advantage of these wage
savings. The global information infrastructure means it’s not important whether a
programmer is in India or the United States to conduct business.
As you plan your careers you might want to consider if your vocation is portable and
could be sent to other countries with lower paying wages.
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Where Do You Fit in the Picture in this Information Age?
Lots of terms are getting thrown around these days in reference to the vast amount of
information available to be processed. One commonly hears that it’s a good idea to be
computer literate or computer savvy or data literate or information literate. I’m going to
maintain that you will need to be a lot more than computer literate or savvy to survive the
information age. Sure, employers do want to know if you know how to type and use
software packages. Yes, I’m eternally grateful that my father made me take a typing
class in high school. There’s also no question that knowing the basics of how to use a
word processor, put grades into a spreadsheet, and design slides for conferences with
presentation software has made my life a lot easier. I remember having to use a
typewriter in high school to write papers. When it came to writing the second draft I had
to type the whole thing over again! I don’t think any of us would consider just using a
typewriter anymore. However, the functions I’ve described are purely mechanical or
rote. You either do or don’t know the basics of a word processor; there’s not a lot of
thinking involved.
Information or data literacy means a lot more than just knowing what keys to press to
complete a task. It means that you become involved in the process by analyzing the data,
deciding what’s valid, how you might use the data, and finally incorporating that data
into decision making and problem solving. This week you will be reading an article by
the management “guru” Peter Drucker on the concept of “data literacy”. I don’t want to
spoil it for you, but be advised that he examines data literacy from the perspective of a
senior manager. All companies use databases to control inventory and production.
However, his point is that the database is only as useful as the thought that went into
designing what factors are important enough to be calculating in the first place. A
successful manager is able to use this data to plan and problem solve. Number crunching
the wrong numbers doesn’t make a successful manager.
In the Library world we call this concept “information literacy”. Here are a few of the
main concepts of this term as defined by the Association of College and Research
Libraries (ACRL).
Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to
all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education.
It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations,
become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own
learning. An information literate individual is able to:
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Determine the extent of information needed
Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
Evaluate information and its sources critically
Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use
of information, and access and use information ethically and legally
(http://www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html)
For the most part I agree with the ideas described in these standards. It’s critically
important to be able to evaluate information and determine what’s valid, and even more
important to you as a future business person, relevant to your decision making.
Information by itself is little more than the soundbytes that you get on CNN. It’s how
you incorporate the information into your own base of knowledge to problem solve that’s
important.
To prove to you that there is a difference between information soundbytes, let’s take an
example that you might hear on the news and convert it from information to useful
knowledge in decision making. Let’s choose an issue that’s close to home and something
you’ll probably have to deal with if you continue to live in the North Country.
We’ll assume that CNN has broadcast the following soundbyte: OPEC to drop
production by 2 million barrels per day starting September 30th. That’s an interesting
soundbyte that you’ll probably remember for all of two seconds, unless you stop to think
how less oil production will affect you in your daily life. Maybe you want to do a little
research to find out how many barrels OPEC was previously producing. Is this a
significant decrease? Does the U.S. have significant oil reserves to cope with this
decrease? What’s the trend in oil price when OPEC drops production on this magnitude?
How will this affect your life? Americans don’t tend to drive less when gas prices are
higher. Think about heating your house in the winter. . . With the data you’ve gathered
above you have some serious decision making to do to keep warm in the winter. When
you purchase oil to heat your house you are essentially engaging in price speculation. It’s
pretty similar to playing the stock market. In August you get to make one of three
choices:
1) buy oil at the market price, subject to market fluctuation
2) buy oil at a cap price, usually a slightly higher price, but if the price does go down
you will get the lower price,
3) buy oil at a fixed price, usually slightly cheaper, but if the price does go significantly
lower you will still pay the higher fixed price.
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What did your research show you about trends when OPEC cuts oil production? Usually
this means that oil prices will rise and that buying at a fixed price is the smart decision.
This was my decision anyway, and it has worked in past years. September 11th caused
this year to be an exception and I will lose the oil speculation game this year.
In business you will need to make the same type of decisions on a much larger financial
scale. Hopefully you’ll be able to apply your data literacy skills by finding the right
information and analyzing it correctly before making the decision.
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