Wisdom Computing: Toward a Framework for Wisdom Research in Information Systems

Wisdom sits atop the knowledge pyramid in the Information Systems (IS) literature. Yet there has been little research on wisdom in the IS field despite the need to transform knowledge to wisdom. Perhaps there is no other subject central to human existence whose exploration holds so much promise as wisdom to help address myriad crises affecting the world. Wisdom is intricately connected to many topics in IS research such as knowledge management, decision support, modeling and symbolic representations, problem solving, systems thinking, and artificial intelligence among others. In this paper, we outline a framework for wisdom research for IS and explore research themes for the critically relevant phenomenon that may be called wisdom support using information technologies or “wisdom computing” for short. Wisdom computing is concerned with the design, management, use, and implications of information technologies for discovering, creating, sharing, and supporting wisdom, and may be conceived as part of an emerging area of wisdom management. We propose research questions that arise from the six major focal areas of the framework and their interactions. We believe that the IS discipline with its interdisciplinary focus on the relationships between information technologies and diverse individual, organizational, and societal issues including knowledge management and decision support systems is well positioned for wisdom computing research.