by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
RSD Solutions Inc.
In the beginning of the book, The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live with Technology, author Kim Vicente tells the well known story of the Chernobyl disaster. However he tells it from the viewpoint of one of the plant’s operators, Leonid Toptunov.
Vicente outlines the various factors that led to the reactor getting to a critical stage, and the response of the plant’s operators that night. The operators knew that things were not going right, but because of an experiment going on in the plant they also were not expecting things to be as normal. Then Vicente pens this line;
“To make matters worse, the thousands of indicators on the wall sized consoles in front of Toptunov presented a bewildering array of data, but not enough information, and so the gravity of the situation wasn’t obvious to him.”
Data not information – I thought that was interesting and related to a parallel in risk management. In our quest for risk management completeness, we often stress collecting more data at the expense of information. Information, not data should be the quest of a good risk management system.
(A series of blogs in a few weeks will outline some of the wonderful suggestions in Stephen Few’s book titled “Information Dashboard Design” which covers the information not data problem.)
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