Thursday, September 20, 2007

Knowledge vs. Information

Why is it important to understand knowledge vs. information qualities when
implementing KM projects?


Dharshini Bandara
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just to make sure that I interpreted Your question correct... In my perception you want to know what's the difference between knowledge and information, to use that insight in KM-projects.

The big difference is, in my opinion, that knowledge is information that is interpreted by someone. Within this process of interpretation, a person 'absorbs' the information and multiplies it with his/hers experience, skills and attitude. Weggeman (1998) introduced the function of knowledge: Knowledge = Information * (Experience * Skills * Attitude (ESA)).

In other words, 'explicit knowledge' is not knowledge but information, till it is interpreted by someone.

See also http://www.intelligent-business.nl, in particular http://www.intelligent-business.nl/index.php/intelligent-business/business-intelligence/, figure 3. It's a website in Dutch, but the model is in English.

Mind that this is one of the two main streams that can be found in scientific literature. In the other stream, with persons like Nonaka & Takeuchi as ambassadors, it is said that explicit knowledge exists.

8:03 AM  
Blogger pbvenkat said...

Dharshini, I don't know if this is still relevant to you. The heirarchy is Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom. Data is an uninterpretted information and it has no value in its form. When the same is interpretted it becomes information. When this is applied and internalized it results in knowledge. Knowledge on repeated use in unknown situations results in wisdom

4:49 PM  

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