Business Intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence (BI) is a category of software and technology used to gather, store, analyze, and distribute data to facilitate better business decision making. Business Intelligence applications include decision support systems, query and reporting applications, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, data warehousing, and data mining.

This definition is nearly identical to the common definition of knowledge management. The key distinction is the type of data controlled. Where Business Intelligence is typically focused on operational data, Knowledge Management addresses the intellectual property that differentiates your organization from your competitors.

Knowledge Management (KM)

Knowledge Management is used to efficiently employ intellectual property to generate competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is defined as the qualities about an organization that are competitively unique, encouraging product and service differentiation that cannot be copied by competitors. These qualities contribute a disproportionate share of customer-perceived value. Competitive advantages provide the reasons why customers buy from one organization, rather than their competitors.

Intellectual property forms a solid basis for core competency, which translates to competitive advantage. Intellectual property’s true purpose is to protect an organization’s investments in innovation and R&D efforts from commoditization by low-cost producers, minimizing the transition of competitive advantages to key success factors.

Intellectual property is broader than just patents. When considered in the context of competitive advantage, you must also include trademarks, trade secrets and copyright protections as components of intellectual property. Using groupware, databases, and other software tools, a growing number of businesses are trying to combine organizational data with the tacit information in employees' heads to create an enterprise repository of intellectual capital. It's an ambitious undertaking, and one that few companies have mastered.

Companies are using a wide assortment of technologies to create their knowledge management infrastructures including relational databases, text and document search engines, groupware, data warehouses, and data mining tools.

Our experienced consultants will help you create a system that brings together information from a variety of sources and gives you tools to analyze it quickly and effectively so that you make better decisions and improve your business results.

To find out more please call Pete Martin at (216) 674-9070 or by e-mailing pmartin@entrypointconsulting.com.