The Organization as a System
The organization is a system - made up of components which work together to achieve an
overall goal. These components can be defined in any number of ways, but you could see
them as different functions. For instance, the HR team could be one component; the
Marketing Unit another component; the service delivery staff another component; the
Accounting Unit another component, the Cleaning Unit another; the Security Unity another;
the IT unit another component and so on. The organization is also a system of people.
All these different functions are dependent on each other. A great HR team on its own does
not make a great organization in the same way that a petrol tank on its own does not make a
car. You may have a great team of staff delivering services, but if your finance processes and
procedures stop working the whole organization suffers.
Data
Data is “raw, unanalysed, unorganized, unrelated, uninterrupted material which is used to
derive information after analyzation.” Essentially, data is plain facts, observations, statistics,
characters, symbols, images, numbers, and more that are collected and can be used for
analysis.
Information
Information is the set of data that has already been processed, analyzed, and structured in a
meaningful way to become useful. Once data is processed and gains relevance, it becomes
information that is fully reliable, certain, and useful.
Knowledge
Knowledge means the familiarity and awareness of a person, place, events, ideas, issues,
ways of doing things or anything else, which is gathered through learning, perceiving or
discovering. It is the state of knowing something with cognizance through the understanding
of concepts, study and experience.
Example of Information
Look at the examples given for data:
4,8,12,16
Dog, cat, cow, cockatoo
161.2, 175.3, 166.4, 164.7, 169.3
Only when we assign a context or meaning that’s when the data become information. It all
becomes meaningful when you are told:
4, 8, 12 and 16 are the first four answers in the 4 x table
Dog, cat, cow is a list of household pets
165, 175.2, 186.3, 164.3, 169.3 are the height of 14-year old students.
Example of Knowledge
If you apply this information to gain further knowledge, we could say that:
4, 8, 16 and 24 are the first four answers in the 4 x table (because the 4 x table starts at
three and goes up in threes the 5 x table must start at five and go up in fives)
A tiger is not a household pet as it is not on the list, and it lives in the wild forest.
The tallest student is 186.3cm.
Example #2
1. The book has data inside it. It contains various words. From outside you can’t tell
what is inside the book.
2. The data turns into information when someone reads and understand what is written
inside book. Now the data of book has transformed as information to you as you
know new concept.
3. Now you have read and understood few thing and concept. This is just the
information. To turn this into knowledge you will have to implement this idea you
have read from book.
Example #3
Like you watched how to make pizza here it is just information. It will become
knowledge when you will start making pizza after watching how to make pizza.
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering
actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make informed business
decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and
external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data
visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to business
users for operational decision-making and strategic planning.
The ultimate goal of BI initiatives is to drive better business decisions that enable
organizations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive
advantages over business rivals. To achieve that goal, BI incorporates a combination of
analytics, data management and reporting tools, plus various methodologies for managing
and analyzing data.
