Dovetailing of Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management: An Integrative Framework

Abstract

The rapid advancement in Information and Communication Technology is driving a revolutionary change in the way organizations do business. The fast growing capabilities of both generating and collecting data has generated an imperative need for new techniques and tools that can intelligently and automatically transform the processed data into valuable information and knowledge for effective decision making. Business intelligence (BI) plays an important role extracting valuable information and discovering the hidden patterns in internal as well as external sources of data. The main purpose of the BI is to improve the knowledge with information that allows managers to make effective decisions to achieve organizational objectives. However majority of organizational knowledge is in unstructured form or in the minds of its employees. On the other hand, Knowledge Management (KM) encompasses both tacit and explicit knowledge to enhance s the organizations performance by providing collaborative tools to learn, create and share the knowledge within the organization. Therefore, it is imperative for the organizations to integrate BI with KM. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of integration of BI with KM and provide a framework to integrate BI and KM.

Keywords: Business Intelligence (BI), Knowledge Management (KM), Scorecard, Dashboard, ETL, Data Mining, OLAP, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge