What is Knowledge as Object

The information age has made information communication technology (ICT) a necessity for conducting business. This in turn has led to the exponential increase in the electronic capture of data and its storage in vast data warehouses. In order to respond quickly to fast changing markets, organizations must maximize these raw data and information resources. Specifically, they need to transform them into germane knowledge to aid superior decision-making (Wickramasinghe & von Lubitz, 2006). To do this effectively not only involves the analysis of the data and information but also requires the use of sophisticated tools to enable such analyses to occur. Knowledge discovery technologies represent a spectrum of new technologies that facilitate the analysis of data to find relationships from the data to finding reasons behind observable patterns (i.e., transform the data into relevant information and germane knowledge). Such new discoveries can have a profound impact on decision making in general and the designing of business strategies. With the massive increase in data being collected and the demands of a new breed of intelligent applications like customer relationship management, demand planning, and predictive forecasting, these knowledge discovery technologies are becoming competitive necessities for providing a high performance and feature rich intelligent application servers for intelligent enterprises. Knowledge management (KM) tools and technologies are the systems that integrate various legacy systems, databases, ERP systems, and data warehouse to help facilitate an organization’s knowledge discovery process. Integrating all of these with advanced decision support and online real time events enables an organization to understand customers better and devise business strategies accordingly. Creating a competitive edge is the goal of all organizations employing knowledge discovery for decision support (Thorne & Smith, 2000). The following provides a synopsis of the major tools and critical considerations required to enable an organization to successfully effect appropriate knowledge sharing, knowledge distribution, knowledge creation, as well as knowledge capture and codification processes and hence embrace effective knowledge management (KM) techniques and advanced knowledge discovery.