Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon’s got an interesting post about the history, strengths and weaknesses of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKM) hierarchy. Overall, the post provides an insightful critique of DIKM as a mental model for how knowledge management programs or services are constructed and offered.

I’ve always found the transformational nature (data turns into information, which turns into knowledge, which turns into wisdom) as well as the lack of  focus on context (‘wisdom’ — whatever wisdom is — is not always necessarily better to have than data) a bit annoying. But read Patrick’s post, it’s very informative and makes some great points.