It might include expertise developed in creating new products, information about competitors and their products, or knowledge about customers and their needs and wants. The goal of knowledge management is to facilitate better decision-making. Knowledge management seeks to bring together all kinds of unstructured information, and sometimes structured information as well, from many disparate sources. By putting it into a single repository, we make it easy to access. Unstructured information might include information on company strategy, new products and competitors which may reside in word processing documents, spreadsheets, Web pages or email scattered throughout the company on employee hard drives or isolated networks, making it hard to locate or retrieve.
Structured information includes data such as inventory, orders and sales.
This kind of information is stored in a relational database. Using a query tool, we can easily retrieve this information, and do analyses as well. Knowledge producers , who create knowledge. Knowledge contributors , who place that knowledge into the repositories. Knowledge users , who retrieve and use knowledge.