The Responsibility of Protecting America’s Data

American’s have lots of data in cyber world and if one had access to all of the Internet searches, purchases, phone calls, household information, text, emails, and databases there would be a solid consumer profile on just about anyone. Large databases stored in corporations and government offices are attractive because of their wealth of information. Protecting data has emerged as a top initiative.

The problem is that this data is not useless and contains an abundance of sensitive financial and personal information. Data that is not important in isolation can be worth much more when combined with other large databases. Cross analysis can create all types of connections among behaviors and information.

Businesses have a responsibility to protect data against foreign governments, corporations, or individuals that seek to exploit this information for their own interests. Consumers expect their data to be protected from misuse and to be secure. This is even more so when they don’t know their data is being collected.

As information becomes stored in various locations across the globe and more transactions become electronic the distance between two entities no longer makes much difference. A person from across the globe could be stealing information and buying products just as easily as a person a few blocks away..

In recent history we have become aware of major hacking of millions of documents from the Office of Personnel Management. Hacking has been an ongoing event long time but we have only now become aware of the data that was moving out of this office. Truckloads of data hauled out under our noses.

By this point the information may been sold to thieves, hackers, governments, and other exploiters. No one knows for sure who would go through all this trouble and what their plans are for the information were. We do know that their strategy wasn’t designed to use millions of background checks for the best interest of society; at least not our society. Better protection of data will be important in the decades to come.

Strategic Decision: The Difference between Data and Good Judgment

Strategic decision making can encourage you to stronger better paths to achieve important goals. When decisions are well thought out they can help you get closer to where you want to be while using much less effort. Understanding the difference between data and the interpretation of that data helps in seeing and then figuring out the choices that lead down varying paths. A few tips may help you think through options and make more accurate choices that help you improving business and career outcomes.

Understanding the data and thinking through the options affords an opportunity to create critical thinking. Critical thinking can be defined as the objective analysis of information and options that leads to a decisive conclusion. To do this well requires that ability to see the possibilities and pick the ones that are not only most likely but also help you achieve your goals. 

Step 1: Define Your Goals: Knowing your goals and what you want to accomplish might be the hardest part of thinking strategically. We may think the data should define our goals but that isn’t always true. Our general direction and goals be a guide to our everyday decisions to ensure we have a framework for interpreting new data. Keeping your long term goals in mind will help you make the daily decisions that help you get there. 

Step 2: Understand the Data: Understand what the data covers and what it doesn't. This requires knowledge of the methods of data collection and the areas that the data has no measurement. Better knowledge of the data will help you stay away from illogical interpretations. 

Step 3: Evaluate the Interpretations: Data is just numbers and letters but there are always multiple interpretations of that data; the most popular isn't always the most accurate. Make sure that you understand all of the most likely interpretations of the information to ensure that the main paths are exposed. This is important if you want the full breadth of options because some of the best one's are not always apparent.

Step 4: Narrow Down the Paths: Based upon logic, experience, risk, and reward narrow down your options to the one or two that will most likely help you achieve your goals. Out of the many possibilities only a few will make any real sense to you. Some can be discarded right away.

Step 5: Select Option and Alternative Option: Among the remaining few options you should select the primary and the secondary option as a strategic action forward. If the primary doesn't work out for some reason you can fall back on your secondary plan. The final selection should include not only your experience, and knowledge, but also sound judgement as this is the selection that will impact a future course of events.