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Figure 9-24 Q9-7 What Is the Role of Knowledge Management Systems? 397
Google Trends on the Terms
Web 2.0 and Hadoop
Source: Google and the Google logo are
registered trademarks of Google Inc.,
Used with permission.

Hadoop began as part of Cassandra, but the Apache Foundation split it off to become its
own product. Hadoop is written in Java and originally ran on Linux. Some companies imple-
ment Hadoop on server farms they manage themselves, and others run Hadoop in the cloud.
Amazon.com supports Hadoop as part of its EC3 cloud offering. Microsoft offers Hadoop on its
Azure platform as a service named HDInsight. Hadoop includes a query language titled Pig.
At present, deep technical skills are needed to run and use Hadoop. Judging by the develop-
ment of other technologies over the years, it is likely that higher-level, easier-to-use query prod-
ucts will be implemented on top of Hadoop. For now, understand that experts are required to use
it; you may be involved, however, in planning a BigData study or in interpreting results.
BigData analysis can involve both reporting and data mining techniques. The chief difference
is, however, that BigData has volume, velocity, and variation characteristics that far exceed those
of traditional reporting and data mining.

Q9-7 What Is the Role of Knowledge Management

Systems?

Nothing is more frustrating for a manager to contemplate than the situation in which one
employee struggles with a problem that another employee knows how to solve easily. Or to learn
of a customer who returns a large order because the customer could not perform a basic operation
with the product that many employees (and other customers) can readily perform. Even worse,
someone in the customer’s organization may know how to use the product, but the people who
bought it didn’t know that.
Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating value from intellectual capital
and sharing that knowledge with employees, managers, suppliers, customers, and others who
need that capital. The goal of knowledge management is to prevent the kinds of problems just
described.
Knowledge management was done before social media, and we discuss two such KM systems.
However, notice in the first sentence of this paragraph that the scope of KM (employees, manag-
ers, suppliers, customer, and others. . . ) is the same scope as that of the use of SM in hyper-social
organizations. In fact, modern knowledge management ascribes to hyper-social organization
theory, as we will discuss.