This process has been going on for at least the last fifteen years. However, the people costs keep increasing. This is due primarily to the great demand for people with software development skills. Therefore, it is our DATA that is of utmost importance and uniqueness. In fact, data, in the strict sense, is but a small part of the equation.
Data are simply numbers or alphabetic characters which represent some entity or entities.
Information, on the other hand gives some additional meaning to the data. Knowledge, then, gives meaning to the information. Such an example might be from internal medicine. Data could be the number 220. Someone once said that standards must be good since there are so many of them.