Chapter 1

Role and Values of

Information
 Good Quality Information

• Information is data that has been processed to make it

meaningful and useful
• The characteristics of good quality information – it
should be:
• Accurate
• Up-to-date
• Relevant
• Complete
• On-time
• Appropriately presented
• Intelligible
 We often consider purchasing more data before making
difficult decisions under uncertainty.
 The value of information (VOI) is useful for quantifying the
value of the data, before it is acquired and processed.
 Information as an economic good
 Information economics is a branch of
microeconomics theory that studies how
information affect an economy and economic
decision.
 For an economic perspective, the economy is
becoming more information intensive.
 The production, use and communication of
information assumes the central importance in
the information era that mass production of
ordinary goods and services assumed in the
industrial era.
 An information good is everything that is or can
be available in digital form and which is
Economics characteristics of information
oThe value of information is not quantifiable, its value
depends on “context and use”
oThere is a great deal of difference between personal and
group or organizational use of information.
oThe division of information gathering may well be the most
fundamental form of the division of labour.
oThe cost of producing information is independent of the
scale on which it is used.
oLearning take time so that there is limit to the rate at which
decision makers can absorb information.
oThere are usually significant information differentials in
terms of ownership of information, access to information
and capacity to use information.
oThe greater part of the cost of information is often the cost
incurred by the recipient.
 Information as product
 Information is an important commodity and a vital
resource needed for development in addition to other
resources.
 The accessibility of the information to its potential user is
possible only if it is available in organized and
consolidated form.
 The information products issued by individual, commercial,
public service, or similar organization as promotional
material for the target audience.
 Library and information center offer today a Varity of
information products and services keeping in view the
demand for information from different categories of users.
 The information products are newsletters, house journals,
trend report and state- of –the art report, technical reports,
patents, standards etc.
 Information as a Service
• Information as a Service is an emerging cloud business
model in which a company share or sells relevant
Information to another company or individuals to
perform their business.
• In the world of cloud computing where storage and
compute are accessed using well-defined APIs, we also
have available to us information that can be as easily
accessed, also using well-defined APIs.
• The followings are general example of Information as a
Service:
1.Zip code or Address validation and lookup
2.Payment processing
3.Services that validate or complete data
 IaaS cont’d

• Information as a Service (IaaS) is a proven approach to

efficient service provision.
• Thinking about information and data as separate from the
processes that use them is one key element.
• This relatively low cost approach will enable departments to
maximize service quality and provide cost savings.
• It is also an essential step if cloud computing is being
considered.
• Information service provides a simplified, integrated view of
real-time, high-quality information about a specific business
entity, such as a customer or product.
• Information is provided in the form needed, including XML,
SQL tables, or files.
• Information is often delivered through SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) infrastructure.
 IaaS cont’d
• Through a lifecycle approach we can help your business
capture, organize, integrate, transform, analyze, and use
information to create insight within a SOA environment.
• Information as a service encompasses a range of software,
services and solutions to address the appropriate starting
point for your business:
• Content Management - build consistent and reusable services for
integrated content.
• Business Intelligence - Analytics and Data Warehousing services to derive
insights that give you a competitive advantage.
• Database Services - manage, share and secure relational data using
proven database management systems.
• Information Integration - enable real-time, integrated access to business
information regardless of location or format by providing a broad set of
information integration capabilities to semantically align information
across disparate sources.
 IaaS cont’d
Key Benefits
o Reduce costs associated with infrastructure rationalization
and migration by decoupling information from siloed
information sources.
o Reduce risk exposure through in line analytics and auditable
data quality for risk and compliance initiatives.
o Generate and governs authoritative master data records with
shared metadata and data quality services for master data
management.
o Ensure consistent definitions, packaging, and governance of
key business data.
o Enable more business flexibility and increase IT resource
productivity.
o Increase the agility for business transformation by providing
reusable information services, spanning structured and
unstructured information that can be plugged into applications,
business processes, and portals.
 Information as an Asset
• An information asset is a body of knowledge that is organized and managed
as a single entity.
• Like any other corporate asset, an organization's information assets have
financial value.
• That value of the asset increases in direct relationship to the number of
people who are able to make use of the information.
• Because information can have a short lifecycle, it tends to depreciate over
time as do many other types of corporate assets.
• The speed at which information loses its value depends upon the type of
information, the asset represents, and how accurate the information can
remain over time.
• In some organizations, information that cannot be used is considered to be a
liability.
• An information asset can be classified according to any criteria, not only by its
relative importance or frequency of use.
• For example, data can be broken down according to topic, or
departments use it the most. when it was created, where it was created
or which personnel
• A data classification system can be implemented to make the organization's
information assets easy to find, share and maintain.
 Information Hierarchy
Data
 Data is a stream of raw facts representing things or
events that have happened
 Data is an organized string of symbols that represent
empirical stimuli or perception.
 For example, Information Science defines data as
unprocessed information and other domains defines
data as a representation of objective facts and events
 Data comes in the form of signs and signals
such as numbers, text/words, images, sound and
alphanumeric characters that represent discrete
facts about an objective reality.

 Data is without interpretation and has no

meaning thus we can use automated
computation to capture and process data.
 What is Information ?
 Information is organizations of data into
descriptions it represents, sentences, equations,
questions etc.

 Information refers data that has been processed

within a context or form to give it meaning
 Information is data that have been organized and
communicated
 People process information based on their
experience and context
 Human information processing is affected by
emotions, perceptions and needs
 Your data may be others information
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 Information can be used to answer interrogative questions such as who,
 What is Information ?
• Information is a subset of data, only including those data
that possess context, relevance, and purpose

Raw Data 42, 63, 96, 74, 56, 86

Mr. John scores in the six first

Context semester courses
100
Processing 80

60
Information 40
Scores
20

0
1

6
10

10

10

10

10

10
SC

SC

SC

SC

SC

SC
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IN

IN

IN

IN

IN

IN
 What is Knowledge?
 Knowledge is the synthesis of multiple source of information
over time to create conceptual frameworks, theories, and
axioms
 Knowledge refers to information that have been organized,
processed and evaluated to convey understanding,
experience, accumulated learning, and expertise as they
apply to a current problem or activity.
 Knowledge is concerned how to do things with causes and
consequences
 The Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and
generally providing a high level of predictability as what is
described or what will happen next
 It gives context through experience, values and insights
 Example: If the humidity is very high and the temperature
drops substantially the atmospheres is often unlikely to be
able to hold the moisture so it rains. 18
 What is Knowledge?
Information is not= Knowledge
 Knowledge is acquired only when one is able
to
 understand
 interpret
 Synthesize
o Information productively, toward some
valued purpose.

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 What is Wisdom ?
• Wisdom is a very elusive concept
• Wisdom is a state of awareness, a paradigm or set
of principals, it is the ultimate context and frame of
references.
• Wisdom is the highest level of abstraction, with
vision foresight and the ability to see beyond the
horizon
• It perhaps has more to do with human intuition,
understanding, interpretation and actions, than with
systems
• Wisdom is therefore, the process by which we also
discern, or judge, between right and wrong, good and
bad
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 What is Wisdom ?
 Wisdom is knowing “why”, an evaluated
understanding, acceptance and appreciation of why
things are the way they are, it is seeing the whole.
 Wisdom involves knowing the right thing to do for
the greater good.
 It requires a sense of what is right and wrong, ethical
and unethical.
 Having knowledge will expand your options, having
wisdom will expand your understanding
 Going up the hierarchy requires synthetic reasoning
that integrate and synthesizes the building blocks in
to more organized and generic patterns. 21
 What is Wisdom ?
 Going down the hierarchy involve analytical
reasoning, wherein more generalized concepts are
broken down into their constitute parts.

 Moving up or down the hierarchy defines a

process that involve greater or less, meaning,
context, subjective and automation.

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