I am now pushing the five decade mark and I find that my ability to learn and absorb information is not the same as when I was 20. But time has provided me with something more valuable, and that is experience. It may be that when I was young, learning physics and calculus came more quickly, but as a young person with little practical experience, I lacked an understanding of how that information could be applied in my real every day life. I was great at accumulating information, but lacked the experience necessary to convert that information into knowledge.
Knowledge, then, might be said to be the application of information to real world solutions. Time has changed the way that I learn. Instead of simply trying to absorb data, my brain immediately wants to answer this question: Why and how is this information useful to me? Not only has this changed the way that I learn, but it has changed the way that I solve problems and communicate with others. I realize that in order for me to be effective in my communications and effect change, I need to educate people on not only the factual data, I also need to help them understand why this item, or process or event is important to them and how it applies to what they are doing or want to do. When you can relate a set of information to someone in a personal and meaningful fashion, the results are dramatically improved.
A further abstraction of this concept is to understand why a given set of information is important to someone else. Security and regulatory compliance is not just a matter of what and how but why. What data is being handled? How is it being handled? Why is that data being used and why does someone want to use it in that fashion? Another example is in how different people understand the concept of Reliability. It is tempting to equate the idea of Reliability to the phrase 'it just needs to work'. However, that equation falls apart when there is a problem and the engineer comes back with the answer that it 'works as designed'. There is a difference between gathering information about your customers and having knowledge about your customers.
Information is not Knowledge. It takes time, experience and thought to turn information in to Knowledge. NICE invests the thought and has the experience in the form of both work and time that is necessary to convert information to Knowledge. We have expertise in telecommunications that goes back to before the divestiture of AT&T. Our people have been building telecommunication and data networks, provisioning TF and long distance services and handling telecommunication processes for years - and not just at NICE. Our developers have years of experience not just in how to write code and create databases. They have real world experience creating telecommunication and customer applications. They understand both the function and purpose of an application. Our customer care people are call center people. They know what is important to you because they know why its important to you and they work hard to make sure that your interests are served. Finally, our Professional Services team brings time on the job and hundreds of call center turn ups to every customer application and deployment. Our PS group will not only implement what you need done, they will find ways to improve upon and make it better.
NICE is a partner that brings Knowledge to the table, not just Information.
