Knowledge management technologies deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. Malhotra says that this idea applies to an outdated business model. Information systems in the old industrial model mirror the notion that businesses will change incrementally in an inherently stable market, and executives can foresee change by examining the past. The new business model of the Information Age, however, is marked by fundamental, not incremental, change. Thus, it's impossible to build a system that predicts who the right person at the right time even is, let alone what constitutes the right information.
Information technologies can store human intelligence and experience.
Technologies such as databases and groupware applications store bits and pixels of data. Moreover, information is context-sensitive. The same assemblage of data can evoke different responses from different people. The reason this is important is that many information textbooks say that while people come and go their experience can be stored in databases. But unless you can scan a person's mind and store it directly into a database, you cannot put bits into a database and assume that somebody else can get back the experience of the first person.