Posts Tagged ‘Knowledge’
Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
I have had difficulty finding words to describe the messages provided by business dashboards and KPIs. That is until I listened to Kevin Schofield’s (of Microsoft Research) keynote at Convergence 2008. He quoted from T.S. Elliot’s “The Rock” to launch into the great stuff that MSR is doing around data
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
So, now I have the hierarchy – Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW). Turns out I am not first to come up with this. Nikhil Sharma of UMich has an article on the origin of this (see here). So, how does this DIKW manifest in Business Intelligence? The data resides in data stores (databases, files, emails etc…). The information is derived from the data and is usually delivered in reports. The knowledge is derived from reports and delivered through dashboards and KPIs (assuming you did PMA and found the right parameters). Wisdom is the actions or the business strategies you create based on the knowledge you have.
