Data is just that - Data
It was
August 2018 at the Great Rift Valley Safari Lodge. That beautiful place in the
wild you know. If you have not gone there you better make it your life's goal.
You lose nothing if that is all you will ever achieve in this life. Sometimes
it is good to aim at small nice things. If bigger ones come by and you become
Deputy President by tragic accident like Ruto William, there is no harm. You
can then become anything including a public thief. But, yes, that place is
beautiful. I always found it quite refreshing holding events there. I know some
people will tell me about other ‘better places.’ Don’t. But August 2018 was the
last time I was at Greenland (that is its other name). If you are taking a taxi
from Naivasha town you rather say you are going to Greenland before you are ‘losted’
(that is past tense for someone losing you) in Kiswahili ‘anakupoteza.’ And so
that event in August happened to be the last training I co-facilitated. Don't
ask me why last. Because I will tell you. I haven't done another since then. So
you see it is the last in that sense. Lest a mad guy down the road comes to
tell me ‘ati’ (note there is no English equivalent for this) you said you
co-facilitated your last event already. But here is the thing. Somehow we ended
up discussing information management systems during one of the sessions. Well,
this may not be my co-competence; I don’t have even a certificate in
informations but, like Ruto and Weston hotel, let me say, I got some interests.
Right? My fren! Yes, I have had well over 5 years’ experience working on
institutional capacity issues and stuff like that within non-profit sector
especially as an independent Viwango assessor, a position I still hold to date
even if am unable to transact any more. Furthermore, I have had interests and
experiences on program design and management and research and stuff like that.
This is a language only Thabo Mbeki understands so don’t mind and stuff like
that. As such information management has been a significant part of my
professional ‘tangatangaism’ (caution, knew word alert). Now. Here is the
thing. Someone, in that forum held at Greenland in August last year seemed to
argue that data (yes data) was so important, very crucial that it was almost
everything around which information management systems revolve. I found this an
exaggeration if not a misrepresentation. I begged to differ with him but did it
quite generously. Otherwise, I should have told him that data, per se, in and
by itself is less meaningful if not outright useless. Data starts acquiring
shape, meaning and usefulness once it has been cleaned, organized, most of the
time manipulated, and interpreted and applied. That is the process through
which consumable information is extracted from data. Until and unless that
process happens data is a chunk of often confused and unrelated things which
tell the world nothing. Plus. Data is menacingly present and available. There
is nothing so commonplace like data I dare tell you. It’s until someone with
some expertise and the interest start extracting it scientifically (meaning in
a manner that is organized not in William Ruto’s distorted conception of
science) and processing it, that data starts acquiring a semblance of
something. Until this happens data is actually not useful. Yes. Data remains
useless until it interacts with a scientific mind. So if data is so central in
information management (just as is the case in any field, really it is because
of existence of science and expertise. In this case I would disrupt a model
that has data as a nucleus and rearrange it in a manner that is yet to be known
(at least by me). But you see I could not be too radical in my disagreement
with him. We must have left there with a bunch of guys who still believe data
was almost everything they needed. And we were paid actually. I have no idea
if, my friend would have gotten converted had I put it to him this way. But it
appears he went to the school where he was taught that data was sacred and/or
we had different understandings of what data actually means. Maybe he actually
meant information but was using data? Anyway.
Data is just that - Data
Reviewed by Ibrahim Magara
on
March 29, 2019
Rating:
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