On the nature of Information Systems
I think at this point we’re familiar with what’s going to come: I’ll ramble vaguely about the topic to hopefully pique your interest while I make self-deprecating jokes about my Schopenhauer-esque humour. It’s a pretty effective protocol that maybe doesn’t work wonders for SEO, but certainly does for getting me in the flow for the text I’m about to write, which is good enough. The major flaw of Information Systems Every Information System has a flaw, but before we get to it I think I must establish a common language for us to understand each other. The astute reader will notice that this article is tagged both as non-code and code at the same time and this gives you a clue that what I’ll talk about here might expand beyond the frontiers of software development. As for the definition of Information Systems, I’d like to start with a basic setup: Any structure through which information is conveyed. That might sound too abstract at first, but it is the right foundation for our discussion. Then I want to clarify what I mean by information: we start with a small particle, a fact. A group of unprocessed facts is just data. Data, when processed and interpreted becomes information. Information, when curated, analyzed and evaluated becomes knowledge. ...