It's all about...

I have had several epiphanies along the lines of "it's all about..." and it occurs to me that I should collect them. The two that I can recall are: it's all about control; and it's all about data. What I mean by an "it's all about" is an aspect that is common to many parts of life.

Control - I mean control in the internal control sense of the word: systems and processes, checks and balances, locks, etc that enable management to control the business. The reason it's an "it's all about" is that this kind of control takes up a huge amount of the resource in our society: we spend a fortune trying to prevent behaviour (whether accidental or deliberate) that we want to avoid.

Data - the reason data is an "it's all about" is that so many of the problems we encounter in society are the result of people making decisions without knowing the likely outcomes. Whilst it's not possible to predict the future, there is a huge amount of past experience and scientific data that we could use in making a decision but don't. The reason is that we cannot process that huge volume of data.