Throughout my readings on chapter one so far, I have gotten the idea of generally what makes up a good information system. It is a combination of data, Information, and knowledge. Because an information systems objective is to make a company operate more cost efficiently and smoother. I thought I would take a deeper look into what exactly is the most important key part in making that operation possible. After digging into it, I now understand that to make a system operate it takes a combination of things that weren’t all necessarily put into the textbook.
The textbook talked about Knowledge Management, I wanted to learn more about it so I decided to look into it. I found one particular website that really helped me understand what it is. According to Russell Ackoff, who is a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the content of the human mind can be classified into 5 categories; Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. (1)
Data and Information are pretty self-explanatory. Data is raw facts that are turned to information after it is gathered together. Now we get to knowledge. Which is the appropriate collection of information that’s used to be useful. For example, 2*2=4; that’s knowledge because we’ve memorized that. But when asked 5984*8,938,484, we don’t know the answer because its not to our knowledge. Which leads me to understanding. In order to do that problem, one would need an understanding of how the multiplication system works. It is taking the knowledge that you have, and applying it to new sources. This is a part of “knowledge”. But wisdom is a category of its own which takes understanding and brings it a step further into philosophical thought. This is how new ideas are thought up. Wisdom is a human trait which computers will never be able to possess. However, because knowledge management is not only a computer system, but a combination of people, processes, and technology, wisdom does play a role in information systems. (2) The chart below helped me understand how these five factors all are incorporated into knowledge management and information systems.
(1) I never realized how in depth the idea of knowledge and knowledge management was. Basically what its goal is, is to take a massive amount of raw data and information and turn it into knowledge and things that humans can understand. (3) It is absolutely essential to the information systems that corporations have developed and allows companies to make predictions and understand their operations. I think that it will be very interesting to learn more during the semester about how everything fits together in information systems.
Source #2: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERB0420.pdf
Source #3: http://www.systems-thinking.org/kmgmt/kmgmt.htm
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