A Conceptual Model of a Knowledge Warehouse - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 153

Figure 1. KW: Four-layer architecture

knowledge Warehouse

introduced. KW is part of a four-layer knowledge
system (Fig. 1). The first layer consists of the
organizational systems that aggregate transac-
tions (on-line transaction processing - OLTP).
The second layer is the DW which is constructed
based on the OLTP data. Above this layer is the
OLAP layer that processes queries on the DW,
and produces reports for various stakeholders in
the organization. The KW role is to handle these
reports while providing the decision maker with a
comprehensive organizational view by aggregat-
ing related knowledge in the context of a specific
business process and pointing to other relevant
stakeholders. The benefit of such a component
is twofold: first, the decision taken can incorpo-
rate other resources of information that may not
be part of the DW reports; second, the decision
taken becomes part of the current report linkage,
available for other stakeholders in current and
future decision-making processes.

While DW aims at facilitating decision-making
in organizations, it is not clear whether massive
data integration can support decision-making in
complex business processes (Tsoukas & Vladi-
mirou, 2001; Holten, 2003; Maddalena, 2004).

“[…] more elaborate techniques are required
to extract the hidden knowledge and make these
data valuable for decision-makers.” (Maddalena,
2004, p. 54)

Several papers addressed this requirement,
but they mainly focused on integrating knowl-
edge views such as patterns (Maddalena, 2004),
management views (Holten, 2003) and quality
factors (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001) to design
and implement DW. In my paper, the concept
of KW as a central coordinator for DW usage is