This paper presents a technology-independent rational inquiry into informing systems in business environments. Depending on the primary concerns, informing systems should be examined from either the viewpoint of information disseminators or informing clients. The latter viewpoint is subject to extensive empirical studies within informing science and partially within the MIT Information Quality Program. It focuses mainly on information products, services, users' preferences, and requirement specifications. The information disseminators' viewpoint is rarely taken into account. Based on a short review of the most popular MIS textbooks and research in this domain, this paper discusses problems one encounters during examination of informing systems in business environments. It uses an improved version of the purpose-focused framework (Gackowski, 2004a), which covers both viewpoints. Two refinements of the Informing Science Framework as defined by Cohen (1999) are suggested.Keywords: Informing schema, informing systems, information in decision situations, valid information, misinformation, disinformation, purpose-focused view on quality, operations research (OR) approach to data/information quality, quality requirements; information effective usability, usefulness, and economic usefulness; refinements to the Informing Science Framework.
Executive SummaryThe focus of the paper is case and real-life problem-based (Ewell, 1997) learning with computer information system projects at California State University Stanislaus (CSUS). While teaching Systems Analysis & Design or supervising senior Information System Application Projects, one can easily spot students' difficulties in applying what they have learned in one course to a different course or a project; there is large gap between knowing and doing. Ewell (1997) emphasizes that direct experience shapes individual understanding. Learning occurs best in the context of engaging with a compelling problem, and with substantial interaction among students, the instructor, and even better with outside sources.At the CSUS College of Business Administration the CIS undergraduate program offers students a sequence of CIS courses in System Analysis and Design, Information Systems Design and a capstone Application Development Project. In the first two courses problem-based projects are assigned to student groups, for CIS professionals work in teams. In the capstone course students are encouraged to select their own real-life project. Group projects assigned to teams provide the proper context and stimulus for learning. Interpersonal work relations, group dynamics, informa tion gathering, presenting project proposals, and documenting their accomplishments in the form of system documentation that also serves as a show case type student-learning portfolio within the academic environment will challenge students.The realism of problem-based learning brings into the process elements of excitement, active participation, and involvement. It inspires greater motivation, and provides very observable satisfaction derived from a demonstrable, tangible outcome. Seemingly mediocre students, when judged by their prior course work, literally grow and surpass themselves when challenged by a real-life experience. The advantages are vivid and clear. The experience impresses an enduring effect on students' entire professional lives.Experiential learning occurs within a four-stage cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Four principles and strategies (concreteness, involvement, dissonance, and reflection) are applied to bring knowing and doing together. The paper shows how the four types of learning environments (affective, perceptually oriented, symbolic, behavioral) are implemented, and student teams guided. Multi-disciplinary aspects of experiential education, and drawbacks specific to academia in assessing students' performance in team projects are discussed.However, many academic instructors frequently oppose real-life projects due to lack of industrial experience and because such projects are facultytime intensive. In light of the overwhelming benefits to students the only legitimate question is how to provide such an opportunity within the available resources. Substitution of a Credit/No Credit asMaterial published as part of this journal, either on-line or...
This paper presents a structured view of informing as a separate field of scientific inquiry and practical endeavors and possibly an emerging academic discipline. It is already a field with its framework, model, a fundamental research question, a point of reference, observation points, and ways of measuring results. It entails basic distinctions, fundamental concepts, and a universal taxonomy and ordering of information use requirements and priorities for their examination for research and applications. It still lacks a clear division into sub-areas. To attain the status of a separate academic discipline, it needs further elaboration of sub-areas and a curriculum model that specifies competencies, an introductory course, prerequisite courses, and laboratories. This position paper is written mainly from the operations management and decision sciences viewpoint, structured similarly as computing, and discussed from the perspective of various taxonomies of academic disciplines. Its purpose is to elicit challenge, critique, discussion, and suggestions to develop a mutual consensus among researchers in informing.
This study generalizes the notion of information beyond its traditional scope and, at the same time, reduces the concept of information to patterns of discrete physical states and informing to patterns of physical states being developed and spread among entities. In its ultimate elementary states, reality appears to be discrete, so would be its representation and its elementary changes. If so, states of digital computers could exactly represent states of segments of reality and their changes. This view removes ambiguities surrounding information and informing; it generalizes and renders them countable, with no recourse to probabilities; and it lays the foundation for their rigorous description, analysis, and synthesis, whether for operations or extension of knowledge. It discusses macro and micro views of information as physical states: (a) macro from the perspective of decision making as representing a change that causes a state transition of the situation, and (b) micro as transversal associations of elementary signals in communication channels. Subsequently, it dispels subjectivity of information and informing.Keywords: Information, discrete physical states, informing, developing and spreading patterns of physical states, macro-and micro-viewed information and informing, primary and secondary informing, primacy of information over data, operational versus linguistic semantics, informing resonance, boundaries of informing, objectivity of information
This is an inquiry into the background and the origins of bias and disinformation as viewed from the philosophical perspective. This paper demonstrates the undeniable analogy between the philosophical framework defined by Schopenhauer and the informational model of decision situations as viewed today in operations research, management sciences, and decision sciences. Bias, and disinformation-the main concerns of informing science are not aberrations or deviationsare the very nature of all communications among living entities. Within the realm of informing science, research that ignores this fact may produce unreliable results. One must face this reality head on. The inquiry contributes to the theoretical foundations of informing science. The results are presented for challenge, critique, and discussion.
In the theory of knowledge, Nietzsche articulated the principle of perspectivism. Using a simplified example, this paper illustrates how changing the optical perspective dramatically changes the results of observations. In the age of information, we still are far away from a reasonable consensus in viewing information and informing. Callaos and Callaos (2002) tried to integrate the disparate views (without excluding any of them) into a systemic notion of information based on distributive notion of truth. Alas, this attempt did not bring us closer to a cohesive view for research and practice. Misplaced focus and ignored perspective seem to be the root cause of lack of success. By placing the disparate views found in scholarly literature into a down-to-earth context of routine human-controlled operations and processes observed in nature most of them can be clarified, explained, dispelled, or refuted.
This is a theoretical paper; it presents the author's position about how to pragmatically view wisdom through the lens of decision making as a factor in human-controlled operations for computerized knowledge management. It refers to the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy, considered by some as the canon of information science and knowledge management, where wisdom is listed but rarely discussed. Wisdom is viewed by various authors as a state of mind or consciousness or a degree of knowledge with subsequent corresponding actions; it may aim only at a passive adjustment to existence or at its transformation. Within a defined system of references, many doubts can be dispelled, limits of rational thinking recognized, and the need for resorting to trial and error realized to detect and counter the unintended consequences of one's actions. Some of the views foster, others hinder, advances in science, technology, and economy. This paper posits that a pragmatic approach to wisdom, when combined with rational ethics, may facilitate a practical understanding of wisdom and computerized management of it and may fill the existing gap in scholarly literature with the DIKW model, which has been revised to the IDCKW model, where "Concepts" play the central role.
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