The Importance of Information and Knowledge

Thus, out of these changes, led by developments in computing and ICTs, the idea that information is a resource emerged. That is, it has potential value for an organisation and, as a result, what information resources exist should be known to the organisation (information mapping became a buzz-phrase of the time), that the costs of acquiring, storing, manipulating and using information needed to be known, and that organisational budgets should recognise these costs ( Macevičiūtė & Wilson, 2002) .

Peter Drucker (1969, p.ix) announced that knowledge has become the central capital, cost centre and basic resource of the economy.

"Knowledge has become the key resource, for a nation's military strength as well as for its economic strength... is fundamentally different from the traditional key resources of the economist - land, labor, and even capital...we need systematic work on the quality of knowledge and the productivity of knowledge ... the performance capacity, if not the survival, of any organization in the knowledge society will come increasingly to depend on those two factors" (Drucker,1994).

 

However, Lars Qvortrup (2006) notes that he did not suggest how to appropriately define this basic resource.

Knowledge is recognized as being of central importance to organizations and contributing to business success. During 1996 and early 1997 the most influential works were:

• the ongoing series of articles by Thomas A. Stewart in Fortune (Stewart 1993, 1995), and
• the book by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995) The Knowledge Creating Company.

Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) define the knowledge-organisation through its ability to adapt to the changing environment by creating new knowledge, disseminating it effectively and embodying this knowledge into practice. They note that "...the sole business of a "knowledge-creating company" is continuous innovation". (Nonaka 1991, Nonaka, Toyama et al, 2000).

Thus, organizational and business leaders have acknowledged the importance of information and knowledge as valuable resources.