Chapter Four: Data and Knowledge Management

Question One: What are some of the difficulties in managing data?

Managing data in an organisation can be difficult for many reasons:

• Amount of data increases exponentially over time
• Much historical data must be kept for a long time
• New data is added rapidly
• New sources of data are constantly being developed and this data is generally unstructured (they cannot be truly represented in a computer record)
• Security, quality and integrity of data is critical but can be easily jeopardised
• Data has different legal requirements in different countries

Question Two: What are the various sources for data?

There are four major sources for data, these are:

• Internal sources (e.g. corporate databases)
• Personal sources (e.g. personal thoughts, opinions and experiences)
• External sources (e.g. commercial databases, government reports, and corporate websites)
• Web sources, through the form of clickstream data (data that visitors and customers produce when they visit a website and click on hyperlinks)

Question Three: What is a primary key and a secondary key?

A primary key is the identifier field or attribute that uniquely identifies a record and a secondary key is an identifier field or attribute that has some identifying information, but typically does not identify the file with complete accuracy

Question Four: What is an entity and a relationship?

An entity is a person, place, thing, or event about which information is maintained in a record. A relationship can be classified into three types: one to one (a single-entity instance of one type is related to a single entity instance of another); one to many (a single entity instance of one type can be related to many entities of another); many to many (many entities can be related to many other entities)

Question Five: What are the advantages and disadvantages of relational databases?

A relational database is based on the concept of two-dimensional tables. Advantages of this type of database include the database being deigned with a number of related tables that can be joined when they contain common columns; uniqueness of the primary key tells the database management system which records are joined with others in related tables; greater flexibility. Disadvantages include the overall design being complex and therefore have a slow search and access times.

Question Six: What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is a process that helps organisations identify, select, organise, disseminate, transfer, and apply information and expertise that are a part of organisation’s memory and that typically reside within the organisation in an unstructured manner. For an organisation to be successful, knowledge, as a form of capital, must exist in a format that can be exchanged among persons. In addition, it must be able to grow

Question Seven: What is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge?

Explicit knowledge deals with more objective, rational, and technical types of knowledge. In an organisation, explicit knowledge consists of the policies, procedural guides, reports, products, strategies, goals, core competencies of the enterprise and the IT infrastructure. It is the knowledge that has been documented in a form that can be distributed to others or transformed into a process or strategy.

In contrast, tacit knowledge is the cumulative store of subjective or experimental learning. In an organisation, tacit knowledge can consist of organisation’s experiences, insights, know-how, trade secrets, skill sets, understanding, and learning. It also includes the organisational culture, which reflects the past and present experiences of the organisation’s people and process, as well as prevailing values.