The poem, “The Rock”, by T.S. Eliot says something quite profound about the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy developed by Russell Ackoff.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in the information?

So, what is “knowledge” in the DIKW pyramid? For Ackoff, knowledge transforms “information into instructions.” Milan Zeleny, who came up with the hierarchy a couple of years before Ackoff, says that knowledge is like the recipe that lets you make bread out of the information-ingredients of flour and yeast (with data as the atoms of the ingredients).

The European Committee for Standardisation’s official “Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management” says: “Knowledge is the combination of data and information, to which is added expert opinion, skills and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used to aid decision making.”

At Vision Critical, our emphasis is on knowledge being “actionable” because of the business context, and on knowledge being a refinement of information because that’s how our client’s extract real value from data.