DINK

DINK - Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

We are really a team of teams at work. No one can claim to work on his own, more so in this era where data and information flows quite effortlessly across. Yet we very often continue to think that the KM issues center around the individual and the organisation. I would like to propose that we insert the individual, teams, and the organisation as the 3 levels where we will need to study carefully to the extent that we are able to strengthen for knowledge transfer.

As individuals, we should be looking at growing our personal capacities for generating knowledge from information. There were early academics who presented strong arguments for the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom progression, and I support the ideas behind such a categoriastion. However, it is too simplistic to imagine that one could progress to Wisdom as a next and natural step in his quest for knowledge, especially when the uncertainty factor increases as it so often does in our workplaces today. So there are no wise men at work!!

There could be some very knowledgeable people at work. These are folks who are very experienced, and who possesses some sort of an almost mystical knowledge bank from which they appear to draw on solutions to difficult questions. Now there has been a huge amount of academic studies on expertise that seeks to dispel the knowledge bank notion. So we should be more aware that in this day and age, the chances of finding a knowledgeable person at work diminishes, and therefore we must take necessary steps to build our capcities to be able to convert information into knowledge - knowledge that is useful for us to do our work.

But of course we all know this..... But this is what reinventing KM is really about. KM in the future will involve a lot more than just the traitional create-disseminate-embed (Nonaka, 1995) orientation, or the knowledge market concept (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Even Communities of Practice (Wenger, 2001) become debatable in the growing uncertainty and information revolution at work.