Barack Obama just might be the first ‘Information Age’ President of the US.
The Houdini Project that his team ran has highlighted the value of information, and especially good quality and timely information, when making decisions or trying to gain a competitive advantage. From the details that have leaked out (and while Newsweek get the credit for breaking the story, I found it discussed here a few days ago) it is clear that from the top down there was an understanding of the value of timely and accurate data with additional ‘richness’ of information to help focus resources (ie not calling people who’d already voted or who weren’t going to vote Obama), prioritise effort (ie putting the priority on calling in areas where voter turn out was lower than expected), and generally just getting the edge on the opposition.
On the DailyKos, UMassLefty wrote:
We were plugged in to the GOTV operation throughout the day, and we knew that it was working, that what we were doing mattered.
Ironically, only yesterday I was delivering a presentation on how information quality professionals needed to work with their customers (stakeholders) to make that link between the goals and priorities of the Executive Committee and the actions, deeds and drivers of the people in the front line to give a clear and coherent alignment of information quality to strategy (and vice versa).
The IAIDQ has issued a press release commenting on the value of the information to the success of Obama’s campaign.
As more information emerges about how the Houdini project worked, I’m sure either the IAIDQ or I will be writing more about it.