What Are Big Data and Knowledge Management?

Data is one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Every organization in the modern world relies on data to inform decisions, support operations, feed automation, innovate, and scale. Yet, data grows continually, making it difficult to utilize and consume. 

To transform all your company data into meaningful business outcomes, you have to categorize it, synthesize insights from it, and create an effective way to share those insights. This is where big data and knowledge management come together. 

Big data platforms allow organizations to store large amounts of information in a manner that is organized enough to extract useful insights. Knowledge sharing through a knowledge management platform allows you to store and use these insights in a way that lets every employee use the most important (relevant) information your company owns. When you apply knowledge management to big data, employees can eliminate time spent searching for the information they need to do their jobs for a marked improvement in productivity and decision-making.

Here’s what you need to know about the two, including benefits. 

What Is Big Data?

There are many definitions to describe big data. However, at its core, big data is a term to describe giant data sets that are too large for traditional software tools to capture, manage, and process. 

Therefore, it requires special technologies and expertise for accurate management. 

Companies use databases to collect and store data from a variety of sources. Big data may be gathered, stored, and used in these types of applications:

• Data warehousing
• Big data analytics
• Business process management
• Artificial intelligence
• IT Infrastructure

Big data is growing, and this growth provides organizations with increased amounts of relevant information to improve business processes and the customer experience. However, without an efficient way to store the relevant insights derived from big data, vital information can be difficult to find. This is where knowledge management comes in.

What Is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of collecting, sharing, and managing information, as well as ensuring your workforce can access the organization’s collective knowledge. In most cases, this is accomplished through a platform (called a knowledge management system) that allows you to store and organize information so teams can learn, collaborate, and become better aligned.

When a knowledge management system is added alongside big data technology, companies can transform insights derived from big data into easily accessible,  actionable information to help improve business processes.  

The Benefits of Using Big Data and Knowledge Management

Big data provides organizations with the ingredients to uncover valuable insights, which in turn can be used to drive informed business decisions. Knowledge management organizes these insights  and makes them accessible so that business leaders can find and act on them as needed. When paired effectively, the benefits of a knowledge base for the organization of insights are clear.

• Increases your efficiency and growth: Digital tools provide employees, stakeholders, and decision-makers with access to crucial information to help you uncover and share insights that can improve nearly every facet of your business. 
• Improves pricing to create more value for customers: Big data and insights can be used to improve products and features in ways that cut production costs and pass value down to customers. 
• Improves the customer experience: Businesses use insights about their customers derived from big data to deliver better and more personalized customer experiences.
• Competitive intelligence: Insights help businesses better understand what’s going on in the market so they can improve their positioning and maintain a competitive advantage.
• Improves customer acquisition and retention: With the tools to gain insight into customers’ preferences, companies can improve services and create personalized offers more likely to target ideal customers.
• Improves reliability and usability: A secure knowledge base can provide you with an accurate and secure collection of customer insights, allowing decision-makers from across the organization to gain a more holistic view of the customer and make better-informed decisions.
• Provides resources to employees: Data collected within a company represents the knowledge required to develop the brand’s products or services. By making the data easily accessible with an internal knowledge base, employees can rely on it to improve their decision-making and ensure they are aligned around the same information as the rest of the organization.
• Improves forecasting innovation: Companies constantly examine processes and technologies used for business to maintain momentum. When it’s easily accessible through a knowledge platform, management teams can identify strengths and weaknesses and examine technologies and business strategies that could improve performance in the future.

Big data and knowledge management rely on entirely different technologies for implementation, but when used together, they create powerful tools that improve business processes and performance. 

Like most companies, you have access to a lot of high-value data. But also, like most companies, you may have challenges when it comes to translating it into something useful. You can connect the dots and turn data into revenue by combining big data and knowledge management. 

About the Author

Byron Galbraith

Byron served as Bloomfire's Chief Scientist from 2023-2024. His research put Bloomfire at the forefront of making artificial intelligence tools accessible to augment the performance of knowledge workers and driving productivity.