Fifty Percent of a City\'s

¶ … fifty percent of a city's population supports the city's bid to host the Olympics. Whether fifty percent is a significantly high amount of the city's population in comparison to Olympics years past, and the other competing host cities are all critical forms of information -- in other words, one must ask questions to give context so that the data can be comprehended in a meaningful fashion.

This is the main difference between the terms data and information. Data is an individual fact or multiple facts, or a value, or a set of values, but is not significant in its raw form. Data is a series of values with structure data that must be given context to become useful. The term February 12 is a bit of specific data, but only in context with meaning, is the data rendered into information. Data in computer databases must be stored in such a way that there are defined data structures and applications or application screens to give that data meaning. (BCI, 1999)

Many corporations have Chief Information Officers. Now some corporations have created the position of Chief Knowledge Officer. What is the difference between Information and Knowledge? What is the difference between a CIO and a CKO? Do you think both are necessary?

The Chief Knowledge Officer is a senior executive who is responsible for ensuring that an organization maximizes the value it achieves through one of the organization's most important assets, that of knowledge. This is usually meant as knowledge in a broad-based sense, as opposed to information in a more purely factual and technical sense. Thus CKO focuses on the 'big picture' of the organization, rather than upon troubleshooting individual technical problems like a Chief Information Officer. The CKO oversees the development of the both soft or management and human resource-based knowledge infrastructures as well as the hard infrastructures of the technical aspects of the company like the CIO. (Skyrme, 2002) the CKO's unique ability to facilitate connections, coordination and communications between a variety of departments is especially valuable in large organizations that have substantial technical and human elements in their structures that need to be coordinated -- although theoretically the CKO's functions could be beneficial in a variety of business contexts, as technology becomes increasingly specialized yet the need for a holistic knowledge base becomes more and more crucial yet difficult to disperse amongst segmented organizational departments.