A major portion of what planners do is communication. We think this article from EDUCAUSE Review is a nice summary of where we see information streams going in the very near future. It's worth your time to look it over, if for no other reason than that it will provide useful perspective: "For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination; we have viewed accessing information as a process and producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes?"

Note the use of "alignment" in the following quote:

If we consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media, we will see where Web 2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to be attentive in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant, valuable, entertaining, or insightful. To be living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being "in flow" with information differs from Csikszentmihalyi's sense of reaching a state of flow, since the former is not about perfect attention but is instead about a sense of alignment, of being attentively aligned with information.

What future role does analytics play in assisting planners to keep constituents' information streams appropriately aligned with an active plan, or planning process?