The Data Warehouse as a Means to Support Knowledge Management

This paper tries to provide a new view on the currently vastly discussed and successfully employed concept of a Data Warehouse. This view presents it in the light of Knowledge Management, i.e. a Data Warehouse can serve as a storage medium for keeping the corporate memory, or at least concerning certain types of data. It helps gaining new knowledge by delivering well integrated data to analysis tools, e.g. On-Line Analytical Processing or Knowledge Discovery in Databases, and thus becomes an important part of Decision Support Systems or Executive Information Systems. In this way a Data Warehouse, storing only data, results in growth of knowledge and may lead to enhance the enterprise's success. The paper does not claim, that a Data Warehouse is the only thing an enterprise needs to perform successful Knowledge Management.