There is a compelling reason, however, for leaving technology until you fully understand strategy, knowledge and process. If you do not have an understanding of your fundamental business processes and the critical information you require, or you do not understand the required format for the information, you will be ineffective at managing knowledge. Adding technology to automate this ineffective process can lead to disastrous results. Good technology coupled with bad process equals bad systems. There are several technologies available that are designed specifically for the knowledge management application.
Data mining refers to the manipulation and retrieval of the information in a data warehouse.
Data mining uses a series of algorithms to identify patterns, trends and relationships among the data based on descriptive and predictive functions defined by the data users. This information can then be automatically sent to the appropriate people who can effectively act upon it. Imagine the alternative the current scenario for many organizations where the data is manually manipulated and distributed to others, who then proceed to re-configure the data in a format that is useful to them. There is waste. Work flow management is basically the automated routing of information through a series of pre-defined processes and business rules.