You would never confuse ketchup with the ketchup bottle.  Ketchup is that blood substitute on your new white shirt while the bottle is the thing that slipped resulting in the white-shirt-blotch. If we can keep ketchup straight, why is it so hard with information?

1. A Budget Problem
2. The Great Information-Schism
3. Dispatches from the Container
4. Working on the Container-Gang
5. Finally, Presentation
6. Notes, Sources and Further Reading

A Budget Problem

This Phrankism goes back to running budget and finance processes.  Because no one ever gets the budget they wanted, the fault must lie with the system or process.  The mark of a good budget-person is their patience to separate the system from the data.  The budget system is the container, the bad budget-estimates are the content. Finally, a budget document or dashboard is part of a third dimension known as ‘Presentation’.

The Great Information-Schism

The container securely holds content and applies consistent rules to ensure content is valid.  The container is generally maintained by a single entity and is content agnostic (e.g. the container does not influence the content). 

Content, is the transactional or momentarily-relevant information that adheres to various container rules.  The supplier of the information and its consumers are likely not the same entities (e.g. a Ministry/Department requests funding and the Cabinet/board approves budgets based on this information).  Training and communication can help an information supplier provide quality, accurate and correct content into the container.

Dispatches from the Container

Reporting and analytics are the domain of the container noting its dependence on quality inputs and other factors such as:

• Governance, Communications and Clarity of Purpose: information containers and content need clear accountability for the process, understandable instructions and good communications to be successful, efficient and effective.
• Secure and Robust Information Repositories: An information container must protect the ‘evidence-chain’.
  • Secure data environments (e.g. databases), access controls (e.g. user ids/passwords), audit logs, validation checks (e.g. sum-checks) are examples. 
• Control Data: Where information is used by multiple users or is the basis for a reporting, it must be centrally managed through appropriate control data.
  • Only bona fide users can Read, Update or Deleted/Disabled [1]. 
• Data Modeling: A good data model can reduce the time, effort and costs associated with managing the information life-cycle.
  • Good ‘information-hygiene’ is and is not always well understood.  
• Separate Reporting from Data: Assuming the above elements exist (a robust repository, good control data and a well-thought out data model), reporting and analytics is straight forward.  Conversely, the lack of one or more of the above can impede these functions. 
• Spreadsheet Scourge: Compounding this challenge is the blessing/curse of the spreadsheet.
  • Microsoft Excel and spreadsheets are flexible and powerful tools. 
  • This flexibility and accessibility can make them difficult to manage if proper data modeling considerations have not been laid out in the first place.

Working on the Container-Gang

Asking one’s self whether you are working on the container or the content can help information custodians better manage a business process.  There will always be a point when the two begin to blur slightly (e.g. adding a new project name, is that container (control data) or content (a new transaction).  These can be determined through good business rules.  

Finally, Presentation

Great content and efficient containers are nice but the final step is the presentation. This is where the value is actually added. In the ideal world, presentation is ephemeral. A dashboard or even a printed report exists in the moment noting that content is constantly changing. Fortunately the container has things like control over time meaning that the report, etc., can recreated faithfully.

A common problem with things like spreadsheets is that they allow creators to co-mingle all three. Numbers are ‘dumped’ into the spreadsheet, annotations added, and a pretty report created. Great, but try updating that complex document with next month’s numbers. Thus the reason to separate the data (content) into one tab (container) and then use pivot tables for reporting (presentation).

Good luck with your containers, content, presentation, and ketchup bottles!

Notes, Sources and Further Reading

1. This lifecycle is often thought of as CRUD: Create, Read, Update and Delete/Disable, see Wikipedia for other variations.
2. A Poor Man’s Data Dictionary, how to define the container.
3. Audit Question Log, an example of differentiating between container and content.