Learning Objectives
- Discuss why it is important both personally and professionally to be an informed information consumer
- Describe information overload, its consequences, and approaches for dealing with information overload
- Discuss the relationship between information overload and information evaluation
- List and describe the dimesions of information quality
- List and describe the elements of an information evaluation framework
- Given an information-related task, evaluate information for its usefulness and believability
Being a Smart Information Consumer
- Online available information has both advantages and disadvantages
- Advantages: easy access to information
- Disadvantages: no quality control.
- Information evaluation is the systematic determination of the merit and worth of information. Information evaluation skills will be important to you both personally and in your business career.
- Personally: sift through and evaluate many kinds of information.
- Business Career: your reputation & career success depends on the outcomes of the decisions you make, which based on better information.
Information Overload and the Need to Evaluate Information
- Information overload is being faced with more information than one can effectively process.
- Information overload reduces productivity, increases stress, and can acutally lead to physical health problems.
- Two major strategies for dealing with information overload are filtering and withdrawal.
- Withdrawal involes disconnecting from sources of information. Example: not checking email, no TV, no Internet, etc.
- Filtering involves knowing what information we need and what information merits attention and use. Example: choose which message to open and which to delete or ignore.
Information Quality
Information Quality The degree to which information is suitable for a particular purpose. In other words, the information with high quality is useful toward the achievement of whatever task is at hand.
Wang and Strong put quality dimensions into four categories:
- Intrinsic quality – important regardless of the context or how it is repsrsented.
- Contextual quality – viewed differently depending on the task at hand.
- Representational quality – concerns how the information is provided to the user.
- Accessibility quality – whether authorized users can easily access the information.
A few points regarding the classification of quality dimension
- There is considerable disagreement regarding the dimensions of information quality.
- It is important to consider the context when thinking about the information quality.
- Information quality has a cost. Sufficient quality is usually we want.
- For more important, higher impact decisions, it is worthwhile to pay much more attention to information quality than for lower consequence decision. Example: buying a house vs. notebook paper.
Evaluating Information
There are two questions you need to answer:
- (1) Is the information useful?
- (2) Is the information believable?
Evaluating Usefulness
- Relevant
- Will this information help me accomplish my task?
- Appropriate
- Is the information suitable for your purpose?
- Current
- How current you need the information to be?
- Consistent
- Understandable
Evaluating Believability
- Credible
- Author’s or the information source’s reputation, influence, and experience
- Objective
- Whether the source of the information is relevent to or has interest conflict with the reported product or service
- Whether it use the persuasive or emotional lanuage
- Supported
- Claims without support should not be trusted
- When support is offered, you should evaluate the quality of the support
- Consider the reasonableness of the claim
- Think about whether the claim is testable
- Comprehensive
- Assessing comprehensiveness requires assessing the depth and breadth of the informaiton
- Breadth concern whether all aspects of a topic are covered
- Depth concerns the level of detail provided
The more information you evaluate, the more some of this will become second nature.
