How do we turn information into professional knowledge? This is the key question we face, bombarded from all sides by information of varying caliber. Everyone will admit that the information they use in their daily work comes from a great many sources with varying degrees of credibility. We participate in training sessions and meet people from the industry. We climb the rungs of the educational ladder and listen to rumors. We browse the daily press and use books or textbooks. An uninterrupted stream of information flows to each of us with the help of electronic media, which are ubiquitous. We must constantly make an initial selection, if only according to the principle that this interests me, and that has no significance for me. However, that is not all, because we are plagued by the problem of choosing good sources of this information. Which of them should we trust? The question constantly returns: does what we have managed to extract from many sources of information retain its validity, that is, we ask about two further characteristics of information: its reliability and its timeliness.
Could a rumor unexpectedly turn out to be more credible than a press publication? The problem of the reliability and timeliness of information becomes dramatically important in the age of the Internet. Although in Poland this new medium is only just finding its place, in the past year 2000 we witnessed an explosion of proposals aimed at the mass audience by so-called horizontal portals. With the help of large expenditures on advertising, operators such as “Onet” or “Arena” tried to encourage us to use the Internet in search of all kinds of information. It is said today that the millions of dollars spent on promoting these addresses did not bring the expected results. We are perhaps not yet an information society, like the Americans or some Scandinavian countries. The issue of so-called vortals, or industry-specific Internet services, looks different. These are specialized websites that are gaining more and more ardent supporters all over the world. Looking today, for example, for information about the entire training market or training offers, I do not look at Wirtualna Polska, but I call up the website www.szkolenia.com. Studies tracking the development of the Internet around the world prove that such services are developing the fastest, because they have well-defined functions and a defined circle of recipients for whom they do what those recipients expect. The logistics environment in Poland is not currently spoiled when it comes to industry-specific Internet services.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2001/1.