Technology and knowledge: bridging a “generating” gap

Refuting the notion of technology as a replacement of knowledge, this paper focuses on a gap between them that needs to be bridged. The idea is that technology represents the means, and knowledge the end of a process that includes many explicit and implicit methods for generating knowledge by using technology. Among these methods is data mining (DM), the leading thrust in the effort to gain actionable information from operational databases of organizations; this is particularly evident in direct marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), user profiling, and e-commerce applications. Two models of knowledge are reviewed. The first follows a conventional hierarchy of data, information and knowledge with a spiral and recursive way of generating knowledge. The other presents a reverse hierarchy where knowledge precedes the data-to-information process. The models are compared and discussed in the context of knowledge management (KM), using DM as an example.