Noise Makers

 

In a previous article, I discussed the high-level logistical process surrounding the creation of information. Part of the concept is that content is data, which can be viewed as historical facts, combined with noise--the intentional or unintentional addition of falsehoods to the data--and the recipient is often burdened with refining the content to the point it is useful.

Obviously, project teams are being barraged with content every day from automated systems, personal interaction, the media and so on. However, all of the content has varying levels of noise relative to content. Therefore, there exists the need to manage the noise so that the actual data can be found. This is true at the personal, project and organizational levels. The first step is to recognize how noise enters into the equation.

Sources of Noise

Simply put, noise is anything other than fact. One of the challenges for a project team, especially those coming from external organizations, is that they must quickly identify noise and mitigation strategies. With this need in mind, there are two broad categories of noise: intentional and unintentional. This categorization stems from whether the noise is injected on purpose or it creeps in due to deficiencies.

Intentional Noise

Parties concerned with what data will reveal may act to distort the data by injecting noise purposefully. The noise may be in …

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