I have a monthly conference call with one of our consulting clients to go over their data, discuss improvements, and hear about initiatives that they they may be undertaking which will have an effect on the data for next month’s call.

I woke up from my month-long slumber to prepare for this call. I saw some unusual trends, noted them, threw everything in a PowerPoint and thought to myself, "Well, they probably already knew this…but it’s what I saw".

When I got on the call, it seems that my information had set off a fire-drill. They look at the data daily, but hadn’t had anyone turn it into information for them. Now it looks like they will have to go in and debug an ancient piece of Java code that no one has looked at in years, cause it just worked. (See Tim Bray for more on this topic)

How does your company turn data into information? Chat away!