Chapter 1

Knowing What We Know

Knowledge and Information: The Framework

This is a book about organizations and understanding how they work. A fundamental idea that we are going to use is that of a “process” because everything that organizations do, in one way or another, can be described as a process. In organizations, we design processes to accomplish specific goals, and I find it useful to think of these designed processes as “workflows,” the term in the title of this book.

Organizations and workflows are both critically dependent on information; in fact, I am going to argue that organizations themselves are information processors, in a very fundamental way. The information they process consists of two main types—information about what we are ...

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