Objectives of knowledge management

Managing digital business applications infrastructure
Management of the 
digital business applications infrastructure
concerns delivering the 
right applications to all users of digital business services. The issue involved is one that has 
long been a concern of IS managers, namely to deliver access to integrated applications and 
data that are available across the whole company. Traditionally businesses have developed 
applications silos or islands of information, as depicted in Figure 3.5(a). These silos may 
develop at three different levels: (1) there may be different technology architectures used in 
different functional areas, (2) there will also be different applications and separate databases 
in different areas, and (3) processes or activities followed in the different functional areas 
may also be different.
Applications silos are often a result of decentralisation or poorly controlled investment 
in information systems, with different departmental managers selecting different systems 
from different vendors. This is inefficient in that it will often cost more to purchase appli-
cations from separate vendors, and also it will be more costly to support and upgrade. 
Such a fragmented approach stifles decision- making and leads to isolation between func-
tional units. For example, if customers phone a B2B company for the status of a bespoke 
item they have ordered, the person in customer support may have access to their personal 
details but not the status of their job, which is stored on a separate information system 
in the manufacturing unit. Problems can also occur at tactical and strategic levels. For 
example, if a company is trying to analyse the financial contribution of customers, perhaps 
to calculate lifetime values, some information about customers’ purchases may be stored 
in a marketing information system, while the payments data will be stored in a separate 
system within the finance department. It may prove difficult or impossible to reconcile 
these different data sets.
To avoid the problems of a fragmented applications infrastructure, companies attempted 
throughout the 1990s to achieve the more integrated position shown in Figure 3.5(b). Many 
companies turned to