Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate - Information Technology/The Characteristics of Information

Measures of the Value of Information

• Timeliness - is it there soon enough to be meaningful

• Sufficiency
  • completeness
  • is there adequate information for the purpose intended
  • Issues: sample size; time horizon

• Level of Detail or Aggregation
  • are the data broken down into meaningful units

• Redundancy
  • this can be a problem if there is too much redundancy or too little redundancy
• Understandability
  • practicality
  • simplicity
  • minimization of perceptual errors
  • difficulty with encoding

• Freedom from Bias

• Reliability
  • are you sure the information is correct
  • verifiability

• Decision-Relevance
  • predictive power
  • significance

• Cost-efficiency
  • need to consider the change in the decision behavior after obtaining the information minus the cost of obtaining it

• Cost-effectiveness

• Comparability
  • consistency of format
  • consistency of aggregation
  • consistency of fields

• Quantifiability

• Appropriateness of format
  • medium of display
  • ordering of the information
  • graphical vs. tabular display

• Quantity: more is not better!