90% of Information Systems is Physical, the Other Half is Psychological

Why do we keep coding and encoding the same things? How many to-do lists, calendars, note-taking apps, contact managers, email clients, word processors, CRMs, and accounting packages do we need? We keep iterating on the same concepts and still not getting it right — yet people insist their particular version is mission critical.

The world doesn’t run on rows and columns. Nature has beautiful patterns, but they aren’t all arranged in a grid. When reality doesn’t fit the schema, we force fit it, ignore it, or leave it to the side and forget to come back.

We’ve gotten very good at moving bits and bytes around. Sometimes they’re malicious. But most of the time they’re just incomplete — pixelated versions of reality. There’s a large and influential school of thought that says more data means better results. But look at professional sports. Data addiction is real, and it still doesn’t account for everything. If it did, the gambling industry would be a lot smaller.

The cycles repeat everywhere. Better software, cleaner data, more rational processes. These help sometimes. But it’s an uphill battle. Humans want structure. They also want control, ownership, and occasionally just something new. New isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just a different arrangement of the same bits and bytes.
And the truly costly part: information is always only a piece of the story. Physics only lets you capture a portion of it. Every map is partial.

Everyone takes their piece of the map, and the combined result looks pretty much like confusion. The clear roadmap is always an oversimplification — useful, but silent about everything that will actually cause problems. And the activities of others can alter your terrain entirely, without warning.

Information is always in flux. Any data point you hold is only a moment in time. There is little that is definitive about it.

So what do you expect when you take infinite possibility and try to reduce it to rows and columns? It may be organized. It may be logical. But ultimately, it is just absurd.