9.5.05
The Hindu Business Line : Go that extra mile for KM
The Hindu Business Line : Go that extra mile for KM
: "THE building blocks of information society are data, information and knowledge, writes D. Kamalavijayan in Information & Knowledge Management, from Macmillan India Ltd (www.macmillanindia.com) .
He defines data as an observed fact, based on some survey or study or some conscious effort relating to certain activity. 'Data can be numerical, descriptive, graphic and symbolic.'
If that's easy-to-grasp information about data, please know that information can mean different things to different people.
'For a stockbroker, the fluctuating prices of shares are information. A librarian treats recorded knowledge as information. In telecommunication, the signals transmitted or received are essentially information.'
Yet, two things are essential in information, according to the author: It has to be perceived; and it has to be transmitted.
Then, what is knowledge? It is a synthesis of information contents received over time, explains Kamalavijayan.
Know that knowledge is an organised set of statements of facts or ideas presenting a logical result or judgment. And also that knowledge may or may not be transmitted; 'it is primarily meant for decision-making.' The omniscient may not be omni-talking or omni-mailing!
The author discusses how `seven properties' of information economics make it different from other branches of economics.
For instance, it is not a depletable resource, but a synergetic one, with value growing in the process of its use. While such perennial-ness isn't something that a miner can comprehend, let's move on to a different question: Can you measure information?
To answer this, the book draws insight from Claude Shannon's idea that a message is a string of symbols, and that information is the probability of these symbols being transmitted without distortion.
'The greater the information in a message, the lower is its randomness, or noisiness, and hence the smaller is its entropy,' says Kamalavijayan, citing www.slider.com, which pegs redundancy of English at 50 per cent, meaning 'half the elements used in writing or speaking are freely chosen, and the rest is required by the structure of the language.'
Redundancy is information in excess, and knowledge is `an extremely efficient information compression'.
Don't be contented with whatever you've learnt thus far, because there's `content' which the author describes as having two major attributes, viz. subject category and direction.
`Content management' aims at effectively collecting, managing and making information available in targeted publication.
A not-to-be-missed section of the book is on case studies. One case is about how knowledge management (KM) is practised in Infosys, as 'an institution-wide revolution'. Another is on Dr Reddy's strategy of `articulating knowledge'.
The author, however, cautions that KM defies a crisp definition. Nor is there consensus on what KM is, so Kamalavijayan explains first what KM is not." ¶ 07:31
The Hindu Business Line : Go that extra mile for KM
: "THE building blocks of information society are data, information and knowledge, writes D. Kamalavijayan in Information & Knowledge Management, from Macmillan India Ltd (www.macmillanindia.com) .
He defines data as an observed fact, based on some survey or study or some conscious effort relating to certain activity. 'Data can be numerical, descriptive, graphic and symbolic.'
If that's easy-to-grasp information about data, please know that information can mean different things to different people.
'For a stockbroker, the fluctuating prices of shares are information. A librarian treats recorded knowledge as information. In telecommunication, the signals transmitted or received are essentially information.'
Yet, two things are essential in information, according to the author: It has to be perceived; and it has to be transmitted.
Then, what is knowledge? It is a synthesis of information contents received over time, explains Kamalavijayan.
Know that knowledge is an organised set of statements of facts or ideas presenting a logical result or judgment. And also that knowledge may or may not be transmitted; 'it is primarily meant for decision-making.' The omniscient may not be omni-talking or omni-mailing!
The author discusses how `seven properties' of information economics make it different from other branches of economics.
For instance, it is not a depletable resource, but a synergetic one, with value growing in the process of its use. While such perennial-ness isn't something that a miner can comprehend, let's move on to a different question: Can you measure information?
To answer this, the book draws insight from Claude Shannon's idea that a message is a string of symbols, and that information is the probability of these symbols being transmitted without distortion.
'The greater the information in a message, the lower is its randomness, or noisiness, and hence the smaller is its entropy,' says Kamalavijayan, citing www.slider.com, which pegs redundancy of English at 50 per cent, meaning 'half the elements used in writing or speaking are freely chosen, and the rest is required by the structure of the language.'
Redundancy is information in excess, and knowledge is `an extremely efficient information compression'.
Don't be contented with whatever you've learnt thus far, because there's `content' which the author describes as having two major attributes, viz. subject category and direction.
`Content management' aims at effectively collecting, managing and making information available in targeted publication.
A not-to-be-missed section of the book is on case studies. One case is about how knowledge management (KM) is practised in Infosys, as 'an institution-wide revolution'. Another is on Dr Reddy's strategy of `articulating knowledge'.
The author, however, cautions that KM defies a crisp definition. Nor is there consensus on what KM is, so Kamalavijayan explains first what KM is not." ¶ 07:31
