The binder of business knowledge would also be cumbersome to update. Changing one of your business rules might require updates in many pages of the binder. It would not be easy to know which other pages would be affected by a change. Naturally, you would also need to update the index and table of contents after each edit.

Most businesses do not have a comprehensive store of the information needed for their operation. Instead, they rely on the prior experience of their employees to provide this knowledge and know-how. When a key person leaves the organization, a replacement with a similar educational and work background is sought as a replacement.

Technology makes vast amounts of information available for our analysis that would be unthinkable otherwise. Without computers we can still analyze information, just not as much of it, and not as quickly. Technology allows us to process more raw data, and frees up time to analyze more information in ways that are more creative. For example, how many file cabinets would we need to store the millions of pages that we can store on a single electronic data warehousing system?

Let’s look at the building blocks of a Knowledge Management solution, first the content, and then the organization. Data are the building blocks from which all content is built. Data can be in the form of a text file, a database, a binary file containing a sound, a delimited data file, an email message, or one of many other formats.

Information is data that is organized; in other words, it has been placed within some sort of context, or relationship, with other data. For instance, a report showing sales by customer is a form of information.

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