The role of knowledge management solutions in enterprise business processes

Knowledge technologies, the software products that support all aspects of knowledge processing and exchange, are the subject of permanent interest for software engineers at research organizations, as well as, for market analysts in commercial organizations. In order to clarify the role of knowledge management solutions in an enterprise business process, in this paper we survey the market of knowledge management solutions and analyze their functionalities from operational and strategic business perspective. Although knowledge flows are identified on an operational level, discussion will show that knowledge management solutions here serve to utilize the enterprise knowledge in an efficient performance of daily work. We argue that data and information collected on the operational level are processed by knowledge management solutions on a strategic level thus creating new knowledge that is used for strategic management of customers, suppliers and partners. This paper gives an insight into knowledge management market that can help the strategic planners to easily begin a knowledge management initiative.