The Battle for Truth vs. Information

The battle for Truth in Information has been waging since the dawn of mankind. On one side are the scientists like Galileo ready to be put to the stake, battling for the truth in information, on the other side stalwart and powerful forces battling to maintain a state of mind that is only good for their business or concepts.
Whenever change is accepted there are victims in the old world order. However, when orthodoxy wins then they put the proponent of the new truth on a stake and burn them, sometimes alive - just to prove their point.

For ages foreign, or new ideas, have been shunned by almost every civilization. Today we are witnessing similar challenges in global information both in Iran and China. On the Iran side the regime has blocked access and broadcast of anything that is anti the regime. In China we saw a regime immediately denounce Hillary Clinton’s speech that called for Internet Freedom. The Chinese term this as the new colonialism in the Information Age and term it as information imperialism.
Thought control is an ancient political philosophy that has kept many a nation under the influence official orthodoxy, in China they sometimes refer to it as Chinese Culture. China has launched a sidewinder when they start to accuse USA of instigating rebellions in Iran via the Internet.
So from history to politics we land squarely back to our enterprise Business Intelligence.
Here too there is evidence that there is a possibility of corporate orthodoxy, when a major Bi project in Chile does not deliver business value, all of the business users know about it but officially there is no word of failure. Why 98% of BI projects are declared as a success in week one of go-live, but this rapidly falls to 55% by week twelve. Why that while the enterprise is hemorrhaging in reporting nightmare and have to do with custom reporting applications the corporate declares the BI project a wild success and immediately allocated the next lump sum budget ‘behind closed doors’ to fix what should have been delivered in phase 1.
If corporate chauvinism becomes defensive then they do not accept the mistake. If they do not accept the mistake then there is no possibility to audit and report reasons for failure. If we do not audit or plan for an alternative then there is a possibility we will continue to make the same mistakes.
The question then is for corporations, as much as for management, to decide whose side are they on – truth or corporate orthodoxy