Data, Information and Knowledge

Data, Information and Knowledge

Data, information and knowledge are key elements for communication and decision making in organizations, but their meanings are not so obvious. They form a hierarchical system of difficult delimitation.

What are given to an individual may be information and / or knowledge to another. Considering the link and can difficult to separate clearly what is given, information and knowledge, and aware of its importance to the decision.

The data elements are raw, meaningless, disengaged from the reality. Are comments on the state of the world.

Symbols and images that are not dissipate uncertainty. Are the raw materials of information.

The knowledge can then be regarded as information processed by individuals. The value of information depends on previous knowledge of these individuals. Therefore, it acquires knowledge through the use of the information into action. Thus, knowledge cannot be released to individuals, it is closely related to the perception of that which encodes, decodes, and distorts the information according to their personal characteristics, or according to their mental models.

The concept of knowledge has a more complex sense of the information. Knowing is a process of understanding and internalizing the information received, possibly combining them in order to generate more knowledge. When you consider the interrelationship between the three elements and make the analysis can infer that the data alone do not mean knowledge useful for decision making, and it is only the beginning of the process. The challenge of decision-makers is to transform data into information and information into knowledge, minimizing the interference in the process of individual transformation. Transforming Data into Information and Knowledge providing data, information and knowledge of meanings is not a process as simple as it sounds.

Individual characteristics that form the mental model of each person interfere with the encoding / decoding of these elements, often causing individual distortions that may cause problems in the communication process.

There are differences between what is meant and what it really says, between what is said and what others hear, between what they hear and what they hear, among which understands and remember, and remember that between the relay. People only hear what they want and how they want, according to their own experiences, paradigms and pre-trials. There is information that people do not understand and do not see, and what information they see no link, information that you see, and do not understand or not decoding; information they see and use, information seeking, information to guess. The state of mind and mood can affect the way it deals with information.

The informational approaches usually emphasize the attributes rational, sequential and analytical information and its management to the detriment of other equally important (if not more) and the approaches related to non-linear and intuitive. The seizure of information is a higher cognitive function that takes place within the language.

If you want to learn more details of the context in which they are inserted, has been to expand the perceptual abilities, because the way of living leads to a narrowing perceptual world and a vision of limited and fragmented and that the needs of people on information change constantly because the perception, in addition to individual, is contingent. Thus, the decision must be aware that the biggest challenge is not to obtain data, information and knowledge, but rather the acceptance that, in the process of encoding / decoding, distortions occur and that there are ways to mitigate them.

You can illustrate the interference of people in the encoding, decoding and distortion in the processing of data into information and information into knowledge by the following example. Different people face a fact that tends to interpret it according to their mental models, which lead them to perceive it differently.

For example: a car BMW 3 the last model, convertible, zero miles, completely destroyed in an accident where the driver hit a tree down, can be coded, decoded and distorted in the following ways.

- Some people will be taken to decode the information based on their material values: "Once a car so expensive! Does he have insurance?

- Already other people, will have its focus on human beings: 'Did the accident resulted in injuries?

- Other people with environmental interests have turned their attention to the fate of the tree "Once this tree! Could not have been in another?

Being aware of these and many other demands on interference with data, information and knowledge in decision-making is the first step to alleviate them.

The Fostering of Decisions

In decision-making process is important to have available data, information and knowledge, but these are usually scattered, fragmented and stored in the minds of individuals and suffer interference from their mental models.

At that time, the process of communication and teamwork play important roles to solve some of the key difficulties in decision-making process. The process of communication, you can get the consensus that will provide for the adjustment of individual plans of action on the basis of conviction and not the imposition or manipulation. By working together, we can get the most information and different perspectives of analysis, and validated to the most convincing argument of confrontation in others.

To boost the quality of organizational decisions, it is suggested a discussion on improving communication and the involvement of people in decision making.

Improving communication

Some theorists of administration, as Davenport (1998), Nonaka & Takeuchi (1997), Stewart (1998) and Sveiby (1998), suggests a new direction for the communication, focused primarily on issues related to the transmission of information and organizational knowledge. The concepts of data, information and knowledge are closely related to its effectiveness in decision making and related to the concept of communication. The communication process is a sequence of events in which data, information and knowledge are transmitted from a transmitter to a receiver. A characteristic of information is the difficulty of transferring them with absolute loyalty, and, with the knowledge the information given value, thus the transmission is even more difficult.

The information is valuable precisely because someone gave him a context, a meaning, added it to their own wisdom, considered the implications further, generating knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, is tacit and difficult to explain. "Anyone who has tried to transfer knowledge between people or groups you know how difficult the task.

The recipients must not only use the information, but also recognize that in fact is knowledge. To improve the quality of communication, the human being needs to develop skills to express themselves and listen. Usually people are predisposed to defend their views. Thus, when a person speaks, the other is not attentive to what he says, but is already preparing the arguments to defend their views on the matter, interfering with the quality of communication.

The communicative action actually occurs when people are free to self, try to reach agreement on a position of decision making, listening and respecting other opinions. Corroborating this view, requires that a number of people with intellectual preparation, information and interest in reaching an agreement, debate all the possible alternatives, to be a consensual plan of collective action.

Involving people in decision

Decision-making in organizations will require more work in teams and greater involvement of people.

The work as a team it shows the procedures of dialogue based on the idea that in an organization, the communication should be encouraged to the establishment of a common thought. The establishment of a common thought is to consider the views of each, so that the decisions made in organizations have a level of superior quality.

Whereas no person has all the information and organizational knowledge and not always this information and knowledge are out and available, so that each one holds only a part of them, the decision-making team is in a form to be used to overcome the barriers of information and partial knowledge.

The decision that involves a larger number of people tends to the most qualified, increasing knowledge of the decision-ease, the aggregation of information and knowledge, the distortion of individual vision.

Decisions by diverse teams, composed by men, women, youth, elderly, tends to result in higher quality. A person with views and experiences of different decoding decision sees situations differently. Listen and try to understand these views leads to the improvement of decisions. Decisions taken in team tend to be stronger that taken individually, although usually ask more.

When it comes to decision making and especially in decision-making team, we must consider the role that the technology performs.

Technology to support

The technology has a key role in both communication and storage of data, information and knowledge as the integration of decision-makers. Also have enormous potential for sharing of knowledge.

From anywhere in the world, the decision-maker can reach past experience of others and learn from them. The exchange of information and knowledge and their quality and speed are at the heart of the success of organizations.

The higher the capacity of information technologies and communication, the greater is the ability of relationships and the ability to learn and profit from the sharing of information and knowledge.

At the same time as they lead to increased ability to share information and knowledge, they also increased the available quantities, which are, after all, an increase of raw data, of which only one party becomes information potential, which means that only few of them are transformed into information or knowledge. The increase in the volume of information and knowledge has been increasingly difficult in times of decision. The executive of the beginning of the century took decisions based on lack of information.

Today, the executive men are facing an increasing amount of information available. Buried in a sea of data, information and knowledge, executives must develop the skills and competencies to separate the 'cockle', therefore, for the information and knowledge are considered useful should be understood and used by decision-maker.

Representation of Elements in Decision Making

Understanding what data, information and knowledge and their interrelationships with the processes of communication and decision with the elements involved in decision making, which seeks to encourage discussion of the data, information and knowledge should be seen as a chain of added value and they are essential to decision-making and therefore should not be confined to the head of the individual organization, but shared by a well established system of communication.

The analysis of the factors involved in decision making does not intend to finish the discussion about the decision making in organizations, in view of their complexity. Accordingly, it is necessary to consider the issue as there is no perfect formula for making right decisions in the company. In the traditional organization, decisions are taken by elite that perpetuates in the decision power through a wide-ranging alliance, causing detachment of macro-objectives and loss of information.

he management communication, is based on communicative action as the discursive formation of will, the debate between subjective intact under conditions close to ideal.

A key element to this decision-making is the expectation of a mature individual behavior, both as social morality.

The result is a confrontation between avoidable and unavoidable complexity of the traditional models of management and communication. Information and technology go together since computers became commercial equipment, in the 1960s. In the first stage, the use of computers was limited to the transactions with high speed, first performed manually.

New tools and methodologies have emerged since then, the search for improvement of systems that started to gain increasing importance, however, there are items to be organized properly so that the computer system can express the desired by farmers, such as information and data showing that different concepts and so often this difference is unclear, causing difficulties for the user of the system.

The data used by the system can be defined as a formal abstraction that can be represented and processed by a computer. We can understand the data as a mathematical entity purely syntactic, which can be represented by structures and formal descriptions.

The representations of numbers and words are easily stored in a digital camera, from the use of conventions and standards related to binary digits and characters.

The informal information is an abstraction and therefore cannot be represented by any theory or mathematical logic. A report, a picture or a diagram are examples of information, as they have meaning for people who make their readings.

The individual perception is a factor that emphasizes the understanding of information.

The concept of information is not accurate, because it involves abstractions and perceptions by people who are doing the reading of the information itself.

The perception is that it allows the particularized message might be interpreted so that the transformation is appropriate for the information, but if the reading is done as a team, not the predominant perception of an individual only at the time of making the decision, providing the organization with that of an impartial decision-making.

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_(By Artur Victoria).