People and Business: New meaning

YOU MAY have assumed IKEA was a Scandinavian furniture chain with a huge shop just off the North Circular in London. In fact, according to the Industrial Society, IKEA stands for a vital technique that helps managers to avoid drowning in data.

Andrew Forrest has written a book, Fifty ways towards a learning organisation, for the society, which is published today. He writes about the information age, and how vital it is to break down the use of data into stages, using IKEA: "Information, Knowledge, Expertise, Application".

Which all comes as news to IKEA, the stores group. A spokeswoman said yesterday that while they had not heard of the use of the name as an acronym, they were very keen to be a "learning organisation, which is a continual learning process."