Big Data Customer Knowledge Management

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) and customer relationship management (CRM) are dominant strategies for value creation for businesses in the new economy. Customer knowledge management (CKM) results in the merging of KM and CRM, where the knowledge management process is applied to customer knowledge, and customer knowledge is applied to customer relationship management operations. With the emergence of big data as the latest phase in the evolution of technology in business, CKM strategies need to be adjusted to meet the new challenges, changing from an internal organizational focus to new external channels such as social media and machine communications. This paper explores the concept of big data customer knowledge management. It presents an architecture that integrates CRM operations and KM processes with big data technologies that include NoSQL databases, Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, and platforms for social media and machine-to-machine communications.