In his poem The Rock, T.S. Eliot wrote:
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 information?
From Sketchplanations:
Some critiques of this DKIW pyramid structure from HBR:
But, the info-to-knowledge move is far more problematic than the data-to-info one. Ask someone outside of the circle of information scientists what “information” means and you’ll find that it’s a hollow term. It thus was available for redefinition. But “knowledge” is one of the most important words in our culture, with a long and profound history. In the DIKW hierarchy “knowledge” slips its mooring, and that matters.
So, what is “knowledge” in the DIKW pyramid? For Ackoff, knowledge transforms “information into instruct”ons.” 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 Standardization’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.”
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