ROBERT O. BRIGGS, GERT-JAN DE VREEDE,

JAY F. NUNAMAKER JR., AND

RALPH H. SPRAGUE JR., Guest Editors

THE DISCIPLINE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS (IS), in the past, focused on the delivery of information to decision-makers in a timely, accurate, and complete manner with a minimum of cognitive and economic cost for acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval. Thirty years ago, when our discipline began, information was deemed superior to data for decision-making, because information had meaning that was not inherent in raw data. Over the intervening decades, our perspective has broadened. Decision-makers need more than information, they need understanding at many levels of abstraction.

In the past, a number of authors have offered various insightful and useful definitions of the terms data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. These different definitions illuminate the different perspectives in which these terms may be considered. In the context of decision-making, it might be useful to think of them as a hierarchy of understanding:

Data: understanding symbols in the context where they were collected;

Information: understanding relationships among data in the context where they are presented;

Knowledge: understanding patterns that appear in information in the context of the task at hand;

Wisdom: understanding principles of cause and consequence that underlie emergent patterns.

The papers in this special issue address critical issues of knowledge as understanding by the decision-maker. They focus variously on the creation of knowledge, the discovery of knowledge, and the transmission of knowledge.

The papers were drawn from the best of those presented at the Thirty-fourth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). The paper by Massey, Montoya-Weiss, and O’Driscoll won the Best Paper award in the Digital Technologies for Management Track. Of the 1,220 papers submitted to HICSS, 470 were accepted to the conference. The coeditors of this special issue selected 62 papers that had been nominated for best paper awards, and an additional 12 papers that they deemed meritorious, for an initial pool of 74 papers. Each of these was read and rated by at least two of the coeditors, who then selected a pool of 15 finalists. At least three of the coeditors and at least three outside reviewers then reviewed those 15 in detail.

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2002.11045701