Capturing Corporate Philosophy: The Future of IT

Context is proposed as a mechanism for organizing Information Technology practices in the future through its role in interpretation. An enterprise organization model based on decision-flow is presented here that is applicable to a variety of domains. It contains elements that mark the information content with respect to a full consideration of its environment. These elements are, in order of increasing superiority, data, information, knowledge, judgement, and philosophy. There are four marked stages where contextual derivation occurs among these elements, including definition, refinement, improvement, and realization. Discovery occurs during the derivation of context and it is at this time that higher-level processes influence subordinate processes. For this reason, it is believed that corporate philosophy can be infused explicitly throughout enterprise practices. The resulting organizational model can be used by an enterprise to strategically allocate resources and maintain competitive advantage. The Knowledge Revolution The successes of Information Technology (IT) and the advent of the knowledge revolution give us reason to take pause and examine the role of information technology in the corporate enterprise and contemplate the role information will play in the future. The scope of this discussion is applicable to a large audience: from engineering-related disciplines, to the medical field, to psychology. The authors’ background is that of engineering design and specifics from that domain will be cited. It has been said that the surge in information capability since the 70’s has been of more importance than the proliferation of computers themselves. Some general areas marking key advances in the representation of information are shown in Figure 1. These lead us to the current knowledge revolution. Caution is strongly encouraged at this juncture as enterprises shift to knowledge-based thinking because often the term knowledge is incorrectly used synonymously for information. This leads to the misclassification of IT tools as done in a recent InformationWeek research survey. It is important to unambiguously distinguish the role of information and knowledge and the tools used to manipulate them. Discussions in a recent article in IEEE Computer supports this need. Pitfalls of current knowledge management thinking are highlighted in the article and attention is shifted to the need to define organizational principles within a corporate enterprise. The ability to direct the role of IT in the future will strategically allow corporate America to maintain a competitive advantage through “constant improvement”. This leads one to question: What underlying component permits resources to be strategically organized in an enterprise and can this be used to direct resources to maintain competitive advantage? The authors assert that context provides one such organizational mapping. Context not only serves to define and organize resources but ensures that corporate philosophy guides all actions in an enterprise. The goal of the summary presented here is to provide a medium for presenting a look at the role of IT in enterprises in the future and to provoke insight and questions that lead to novel advances in the field. A Model for Corporate Philosophy Significant bodies of research and practical knowledge exist in information science as a whole. These cover modeling, utilization, creation, cognition, and a variety of other aspects. Distilling this body of research, the ‘70 ‘80 ‘90 ‘00 Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data Standard for Exchange of Product odel Data Object-Oriented Database Management System Object-Oriented Database anagement System Initial Graphics Exchange Specification Initial Graphics Exchange Specification Relational Database Management System Relational Database anagement System Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Enterprise Resource Planning Enterprise Resource Planning Knowledge Management Knowledge anagement Figure 1. Information Technology Focus Areas