Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 2

News Story by Peter G.W.

Keen
NOVEMBER 17, 1997 "Information" is increasingly a misleading and even damaging term. It lies behind the
continuing fallacies that have driven fads, overexpectations and underdelivery on
promises. The following are the main ones:
1) The information fallacy that almost destroyed the information systems field in the
1970s. That fallacy was that data is equivalent to information. The IS department - note
the title that had replaced data processing as the organizational label for the "computer
department" - assumed that its growing data resources constituted an inventory of value
to managers. Instead, it largely created a data bureaucracy.
2) The knowledge fallacy that underlies many of the claims about the Internet, the
Information Age, Information Society and the like. Here, the assumption is that
information equals knowledge. No way. If that were so, we wouldn't be facing a
continued crisis in our education system. We are an information-rich society, but are we
really knowledge-rich? Does the wealth of the Internet as an information cornucopia in
itself translate into knowledge? Of course not, whatever the wilder 'net denizens may
hope.
The emergence of knowledge management and data warehousing engenders the next
dangerous notion: that knowledge equals action.
All these fallacies come from thinking of information as a good in itself. IS looked at
how to organize it. The Internet/intranet movement has worked to make it available. The
data warehousing school makes it easy to access. They are all supply-side conceptions of
the role of technology. They treat information as independent of people. Reading through
about 200 articles and conference proceedings on data warehousing for a recent project, I
was struck by how little they have to say about action - real people making real decisions
to have real impact. They don't look at how those real people - not some abstraction we
call "users" - become informed. Equally, there's plenty of talk in the groupware and
workflow field about sharing information but relatively little about the reasons for
sharing.
Most of the impacts of technology on the basics of business and competition have been
less about information than about coordination of logistics and the movement of
information: point of sale and quick response, for example. ATMs, the exemplar of
telecommunications in action, changed everyday life through service access; it's
stretching matters to call this information technology. Data warehousing, a major step
forward in enabling customer service, decision-making and planning, will succeed only if
it pays attention to processes and people. Otherwise, all this new "knowledge" will sit in
the warehouse unopened.

Think about your own firm. If a magic fairy instantly gave you absolutely all the
information resources the company would ever need, do you think people would instantly
know what to do with it and how to use it well? If not, why isn't education and support
the largest part of your data warehousing budget?
Substitute for "information technology" a phrase such as "coordination technology,"
"business technology," "collaboration technology" or "learning technology" and you have
a different focus - one that begins with people, not the information supply and its
organization. In my readings on data warehousing, I felt my age. It was the decisionsupport systems (DSS) literature of the 1970s all over again. The DSS movement began
with a strong focus on decision makers and decision processes; that's what made it the
new mainstream. It lost that focus as PCs, spreadsheets and GUIs moved center stage. As
a colleague who was a leader in the DSS field ruefully commented years later, we lost the
"D" in DSS. The system, not decision and support, became the focus. The data
warehousing and knowledge management fields are rediscovering too little and too late
what the early DSS field knew: It's information use, not information supply, that we need
to address and encourage.
Data supply doesn't create information. Information doesn't lead automatically to
knowledge. Knowledge doesn't lead directly to action. Business action and impact are the
goal. There's a distinct danger of the data warehousing and knowledge management fields
overlooking this. Start with the people and their work, not the information.

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi