Objectives of knowledge management

1 
Storage/physical. Memory and disk hardware components (equivalent to Level IV in 
Figure 3.3 ).
2 
Processing. Computation and logic provided by the processor (processing occurs at 
Levels I and II).
3 
Infrastructure. This refers to the human and external interfaces and also the network, 
referred to as ‘extrastructure’. (This is Level III, although the human or external inter-
faces are not shown there.)
4 
Application/content. This is the data processed by the application into information. 
(This is Level V.)
5 
Intelligence. Additional computer- based logic that transforms information to knowl-
edge (Level I).
Each of these elements of infrastructure presents separate management issues which we will 
consider separately.
A short introduction to Internet technology 
As you will know, the Internet enables communication between millions of connected com-
puters worldwide, but how does the seamless transfer of data happen? Requests for informa-
tion are transmitted from client computers and mobile devices whose users request services 
from server computers that hold information and host business applications that deliver the 
services in response to requests. Thus, the Internet is a large- scale
 client– server
system.
Figure 3.4 shows how the client computers within homes and businesses are connected to 
the Internet via local