The Confusing KID!

In knowledge management field there have been various attempts to give a proper distinction between Data, Information and Knowledge. I remember my Undergrad days when I studied this distinction as follows:

Data: flow of events with no meaning
Information:”Something”+”Transformation”+Data
Knowledge: “Something”+Transformation”+Information. (Laudon, Laudon, 2007)

I had always been wondering what this something is and what transformation takes place that it changes these from one to other. It is easily seen that I learnt the well known liner hierarchy. This same thing is given by many other others like Herder and colleagues, 2003 and Davenport and Prusak 1998.

I went through many papers and found that Data was described as “flow of events” (Laudon and Laudon 2007), “Raw facts” (Bhatt, 2001), “Symbols” (Ackoff, 1989) and “Discrete and non-contextual” (Herder and colleagues, 2003; Davenport and Prusak 1998). I find that all these scholars have agreed on one thought that data is some “possession that is isolated”. It does not have a value until applied in some context.

Now Information has been described as “endowed by relevance and purpose” (Herder and colleagues, 2003; Davenport and Prusak 1998), “Categorized Data” (Laudon and Laudon 2007), “Organized Data” (Bhatt, 2001) and “Processed Data” (Ackoff, 1989).
Here again I see the similarity between words and find that they are just synonyms of each other.

Coming to Knowledge it is “Meaningful Information” (Bhatt, 2001; Herder and colleagues, 2003; Davenport and Prusak 1998), “Information that answers the question of How” (Laudon and Laudon 2007; Ackoff, 1989). Again as we can see this is a simple combination of Data and Information with context to it.

We all see that this knowledge hierarchy is unidirectional. But now there are other people who say that it’s not unidirectional. The question they ask and so do I is where does this “data and Information come from?”(Stenmark, 2002) It is again the knowledge that gives birth to Information and Data. So this gives us a circular perspective of KID.

But the question is how is this going to affect the organizations?
Do they need this distinction?

I have a gut feeling that for all of us data is not a big issue as it is some stats, figures or whatever it might be which has no meaning. But the major confusion lies between Information and knowledge. It is here that the word “perspective” plays a vital role.
It depends on us as to what context and perspective we are seeing the matter. Then only it will become knowledge or information. Also Alvi and Liedner(1999) say that “knowledge is not a radically different concept than information“ It has also been agreed upon by the gurus that “Knowledge is subjective”( Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Herder and colleagues 2003). So if I can further elaborate what all these people are trying to say is that it depends on the individual as to what these facts, figures, symbols, events are to him .it depends entirely on what that person’s brain is thinking and what knowledge he has. I would like to cite an example that when I started this module I started reading various papers by scholars and it was all information for me because I don’t have enough knowledge about this subject. But now if some one comes and asks me what is knowledge or Information or KM I can answer him with confidence because the information has undergone the process of thoughts, reflection and perspective and become knowledge as assessment has been added to it.

As you can see knowledge is what we have in our mind and is specific to a context, it is situational and has a location (our brain). While information is that has not got any assessment or context yet.

This is my distinction for my personal reference but as far as the real world is concerned this distinction is not going to make a big difference. It just depends on what word the person wants to use and what perspective he is seeing the matter. An apt example I can think of is when in an organization the software development team is stuck on some code. They call an expert and ask him to give his “information” regarding the same. Here though the team is asking for information it is actually the knowledge of that person.

I would like to add that KID are same words used as an when required. I find it similar to how we use “Nice”, “Good” and “Awesome” in English. I agree that a basic distinction does exists and its good to keep that in mind but its not necessary to indulge so much into it. As far as we know whether we want Data, Information or knowledge it’s fair to use any word for it.


References
Ackoff, R. L. (1989), "From Data to Wisdom", Journal of Applies Systems Analysis, Volume 16, p 3-9.

Alavi, M. and Leidner, D.E. (1999), “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems vol.1 no.7, pp. 1-37.

Bhatt, G. D. (2001), “Knowledge management in organisations: examining the interaction between technologies, techniques, and people”, Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 68-75.

Davenport, T. and Prusak, L. (1998), “Working Knowledge: How organisations manage what they know”, USA: Harvard Business School Press.

Herder P.M., Veeneman W.W., Buitenhuis M.D.J. and Schaller A. (2003), “Follow the rainbow: a knowledge management framework for new product introduction”, Journal of Knowledge Management vol.7 no.3, p. 105-115.

Laudon.K.C and Laudon J.P. (2007),”Management Information Systems Managing the digital firm”, 10th Edition, Pearson Education, P. 466

Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995), The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford University Press.

Stenmark D. (2002), “Information vs. Knowledge: The Role of Intranets in Knowledge Management”, Proceedings of the IEEE 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.