If you are flying over a state, you will be able to know if you’re over a town if you see rooftops, or if you are over a forest if you see treetops. Information systems should have a layer where you can only focus on the x-tops in order to know where you are or like some people call it a 30,000 ft view of where we are standing compare to where we should be or thought we were.
However if you build an information system that only focuses on the forest, it will be very difficult to do something and link it to a specific result or to really understand the problem. This is the reason that your information system should have a tree level, where you can tell a tree from the rest, if it is a redwood or a sequoia, if it is 50 years old or 100. It is at this level where you can start understanding the cause and effect of things or to differentiate an alarm from another.
At this point, if you want to have a very robust information system you will need a raccoon level, where you can come very close to the tree and see that the raccoon is at a very specific tree. This level of detail can help you make action plans, react to specific needs or even lower priorities of problems.
It is important that the information system allows information workers to go from forest to raccoon very quickly and vice versa.Weak information systems either focus on forest or raccoon but do not give a vertical drill down capability in seconds from forest to tree to raccoon.
The question at hand, what kind of information system do you have? Or are you building?
