Powerful, affordable technology is available to midsize firms, and the benefits are enormous.
Enterprises have always been organized around the fact that somebody knew something—market needs, technology capabilities, economic currents—and had the resources, intelligence, and intuition to analyze and act positively with or against those facts, or information. As enterprises have grown so have the volume and types of information, presenting both opportunities and obstacles in terms of its exploitation and its management.
In today's businesses, information assembly and storage is moving away from paper-glutted file cabinets in favor of increasingly powerful and flexible databases—electronic libraries that can be configured for virtually infinite capacity and easy, flexible search, access, and recovery. The challenge to an enterprise is to know its information's value; know how to gather, store, and maintain it; and then know how to exploit in a purposeful manner. All of this "knowing" comes together as "knowledge," and while this interpretation may fall short of some of the loftier descriptions of knowledge theorists, it applies well in midsize business organizations.