The Role of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management

Some industry buzzwords gain market acceptance, while others end up on the scrapheap. Business intelligence (BI) has gained acceptance (even though there are many definitions for it), but knowledge management (KM) has had a mixed reception. Knowledge management has struggled because organizations have often tried to implement large enterprise-wide knowledge management projects and failed, and also because of the complexity bringing together the many components and technologies involved.

Business intelligence applications in the past have simply analyzed detailed data warehouse data and produced high-level summarized data, or measurements, about business performance. The recent trend, however, is toward the use of business performance management (BPM) applications that put these measurements into a business context, i.e., they relate the data measurements to business goals and objectives. Putting performance measurements into a business context improves the business decision-making and action-taking processing because the results become actionable. Read on."