any type device, and will permit establishing the optimum inspection frequency for a regulatory body. Savings incident to such a program are obvious in the reduction of overinspections, which would normally fall between the uprights in the useful accuracy life span area anyhow.

Although we have not explored the possibilities, it appears that such a program would be adaptable to service contract type of work outside the realm of regulatory effort, with a maximum return for the firm utilizing such a program certainly assured, over a competitor operating on a time-frame schedule.

Our statewide information system, which, much like weights and measures in the beginning, had a tough time trying to figure out what was being done much less, manage information. However, time and tremendous effort by those individuals who believed in the basic concept resolved the early shortcomings, and we now have an operable SWIS or, for our purpose, a management information system.

We had initial difficulties in defining our measures of effectiveness. Those of you who have suffered with PPB are familiar with this problem. Those of you who have been more fortunate and have escaped it should reflect upon such questions as: (1) Why am I in the regulatory business? (2) What are my major areas of responsibility? (3) Could my budget be more beneficially spent in more meaningful endeavors?

These questions are good for many hours of soul searching, and you will set a new time record for turnaround documents that are rejected and graded "F" if your answers are like the following: (1) Statute laws require a weights and measures division. (2) I am responsible to see that commercial measuring equipment is accurate, and that package weights and their labels are correct. (3) No, nobody can spend my money any better than I can. Why, we have had weights and measures since Biblical times.

These are not acceptable justifications under PPB; and since you are in competition with every other agency for your tax dollar budget, you rapidly find effective ways to express your reason for being in business, or it will be expressed for you.

In Hawaii, we accepted President Kennedy's definition that "we are all consumers"-industry, business, and the individual alike. So the established program objective of "reducing consumer losses" is palatable to us. More important, it is measurable and quantifiable, both of which are necessary to support our contended effectiveness and which naturally constitute the elements for cost/benefit analysis. While we are still struggling in our infancy with this program, we have made progress, which I would have said was impossible five years ago and, in fact, was impossible without the aid of the computer as a management tool.

THE INFORMATION CRISIS

by D. E. EDGERLY, Weights and Measures Coordinator, Office of Weights and Measures

If we pause to consider the significance of much of our progress during the past 150 years, we will single out as perhaps one of the most influential advances, vastly improved and sophisticated communications media. From the first telegraphic message in 1844, to our present day experimentation with laser borne communications, man has placed increased importance upon the need for rapid and accurate dissemination of information.

Television, radio, and the telephone have largely transformed this country into a position of prominence among the informed nations of the world. By definition, inform implies the imparting of knowledge, especially of facts or occurrences necessary for an understanding of a pertinent matter or as a basis for action. However, the extent to which we are informed varies with the different communications media. Certainly, the news medium is an information network designed to offer an unbiased accounting of world, national, or local affairs. On the other hand, we have the entertainment medium which, though often informative, is more actively engaged in playing on our emotions during our leisure hours. Then, of course, we have the advertising medium concerned primarily with campaigns and slogans slanted to gain the acceptability and dollar support of goods and services.

It often seems highly contradictory to me that a nation capable of achieving a moon landing and finding cures for dreaded diseases can at the same time be motivated by such titillating phrases as: "Let us put a tiger in your tank." "Is it true that blondes have more fun?" "Make peace with grease." Yet, the American consumer manages to cast billions of dollar votes for these campaign ads of marketplace products and, of course, the list of these slogans is endless as you know. From this behavior pattern, then, we learn that the motivation factor can be affected by various stimuli. Understanding these stimuli provides us with the tools to cause a person to act in a predictable fashion.

We come to understand, therefore, that the information process is better understood if approached as a science. In light of such, management science is emerging with a new concept of information, or, if you like, management theory, which differentiates between data, information, and knowledge. Learning to employ data, information,

and knowledge to motivate persons to act in a predictable manner is the crisis we face.

"Information is conventionally defined as obtained knowledge, facts, data, or news" [1]. The main inadequacy of this definition is that an assemblage of facts or the imparting of knowledge may or may not represent information depending upon the judgment of the recipient. For example, a collection of data showing the number of devices inspected over a period of time represents facts. Such facts or data may or may not be classified as information, depending upon the significance being given to these assembled characters by the transmitter of such data and its eventual recipient. If your objective is to inspect 10,000 devices in a 12-month period, and the data before you have the significance of substantiating your objective, your information needs are fulfilled. If, on the other hand, you transmit these data to your superior and he comes back asking what percent of the devices inspected were rejected, you have not fulfilled his information needs and the data you have supplied were of little significance to him. "Significance is defined as a measure of the net value obtained from matching the needs of a specific problem with appropriate elements of data" [2].

I am not suggesting that facts or data play no role in our management process. Certainly, they play an important role, just as facts are the agent of the newscaster. There are times when we will need to broadcast data or facts. However, there are going to be times when, as in the case of an entertainer, we need to add significance to the facts to play on emotions. There will also be times when we will need to advertise. Knowing how and when to employ these techniques in our day-to-day management process may decide our success or failure as a manager. "The distinction between information and data is that information is concerned with the use of evaluated data for a specific problem and for a certain individual at a certain time to achieve a definite goal. As problems vary, persons change, or time passes, the value of information differs. That is, the value of information is not detached and permanent in itself. Its value is a function of its uses" [3].

Knowledge is essentially information which has been stored away for future use and its value is such that it is the ultimate conclusion of the information process. How many times have you come away from a briefing feeling that your delivery of the subject matter was adequate and, yet, you wonder how well those in attendance perceived what you said? In short, this may be classified as the “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant" [4] syndrome.

In the awareness that differences do exist among data, information, and knowledge, we, as weights and measures managers, must learn how to use data and how to generate useful information from data that will reflect how well we are achieving our program goals. Certainly, there is no shortage of data in any weights and measures department. As a matter of fact, the mountains of data being collected by field personnel represent a significant management problem in terms of what to do with these data. I submit to you, however, that there is a very real shortage of information in most weights and measures departments. The problem we now face it, I think, twofold:

1. We tend to believe that the information needs for everyone in our organization are the same. As a result, inspectors, supervisors, and superiors alike are offered the same information whether or not they want it, need it, or understand it. Most of us have children. Consider for a moment a situation where a father gathers his three sons together and says, "Boys, I think I'll tell you all the facts of life." After his discussion, his three-year-old son yawns and says, "Dad, what's a girl?" His six-year-old sticks out his tongue and says, "I hate girls," and his 13-year-old says, "So what's new!" Information, to be effective, must be useful to the recipient.

2. We do not understand how to use information to effect a desired conduct. If top level department decisions are being made on the importance of various programs, and you are asked for input, how much consideration do you think your program will receive if you simply submit a record of devices inspected and rejected by your department. "According to information theory, the more uncertain the decision maker is in selecting a certain course of action the greater is the amount of information supplied by useful data” [5]. I underline and emphasize the term "useful data." To be useful, they must satisfy a need for information, and this means that we, as managers, must recognize that need and know something about the person to be affected by the information before we can structure the information to produce the desired conduct we want from the recipient. When we achieve an understanding of the information process and learn how to employ it effectively, then we can begin to predict the forces that affect our programs and plan around them instead of reacting to them.

The information crisis is not confined to weights and measures administration. It cuts through nearly every discipline known to modern man. As a result of the need for fast, reliable information, we are experiencing the growth pains of an entirely new industry in this country devoted to the science of information. As a concept, this is perhaps best explained by one of the most perceptive management experts of our time, Peter Drucker.

The Information Industry

There is a great deal more to information and data processing than the computer; the computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry.

The electrical industry became a certainty when Ernst Werner von Siemens invented the first practical generator in 1856. But the electrical industry only became a reality twenty-three years later, in 1879, when Edison designed the electric light bulb. In between there was furious activity with a host of highly talented inventors at work. If it had been fashionable then to speak of "first-generation," "second-generation," or "third-generation" computers, there would have been a "fifth-generation" or a "sixth-generation" generator before there really was any widespread use of electric power. Practically every single one of the major electricapparatus companies (like Westinghouse) that are still household words today was already founded by 1879 in every industrial country, including small ones as Sweden, Switzerland, and Hungary. But it was only Edison's light bulb that made possible the use of electricity as a universal form of energy.

Without the central power station there would be no electrical industry; without the computer there would be no information industry. And yet most of the money in the electrical industry and most of the engineering and technical ingenuity as well have been invested in the equipment to transmit and to apply, whether power lines, lights, motors, or appliances. Similarly most of the money and most of the ingenuity of the information industry will go into the transmission and application of information rather than into its generation and storage, that is, into the computer. And most of the profit will come from transmission and application too. Since the computer first appeared in the late 1940's, the information industry has been a certainty. But we do not have it yet. We still do not have the effective means to build an “information system." This is where the work is going on, however. The tools to create information systems may already exist: the communications satellite and other means of transmitting information, microfilm and the TV tube to display and store it, rapid printer to reduce it to permanent record, and so on. There is no technical reason why someone like Sears Roebuck should not come out tomorrow with an appliance selling for less than a TV set, capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity, and giving immediate access to all the information needed for schoolwork from first grade through college.

Yet though IBM is now shipping computers at the rate of a thousand a month, we do not have the equivalent of Edison's light bulb. What we are lacking is not a piece of hardware like the light bulb. What we still have to create is the conceptual understanding of information. As long as we have to translate laboriously every set of data into a separate "program," we do not understand information. We have to be capable of classifying information according to its characteristics. We have to have a "notation," comparable to the one St. Ambrose invented 1600 years ago to record music, that can express words and thoughts in symbols appropriate to electronic pulses rather than in the clumsy computer language of today. Then each person could, with very little training, store his own data within a general system, that is, what the computer engineers call a "routine." Then we shall have true "information systems."