Knowledge
Management or Business Intelligence
We used to talk "data
management" (databases). We used to talk "information
management" (warehouses), now we talk "knowledge management" and ”business intelligence.” Although the concepts are related, the
terms generally focus on different roles of information within
organizations.
Knowledge management entails the capturing of one person's expertise and
insights and sharing it with others. Assume a partner at a major consulting
firm is asked by a client to design and implement a new technology. The partner
will begin by looking for expertise within the consulting firm to avoid
"reinventing the wheel." The partner's search may be facilitated by a
repository of expertise, generic documents, and forms, etc.
Knowledge management focuses
on the capture, storage, and dissemination of explicit and tacit knowledge
within organizations. This is the essence of knowledge management.
"Business Intelligence combines technologies--such as customer relationship
management, data warehousing and mining, and knowledge management --to help
organizations leverage their information to make better and faster
decisions. As an example, one large
European telecommunications company analyzes data from its 5.7 million
customers. Key applications, which
monitor network utilization and sales force performance, analyze
over six terabytes of data.
Management is able to drill down in the data to find specific
information about new customers, successful sales channels, or popular
products, and receive that information in easy-to-read, one page reports. This
business intelligence helps management better access performance and improve operational efficiencies." (Luftman
& McLean, 2004)
Business intelligence
entails significant technical extracts from existing systems and combining and
loading clean data into a business intelligence system that focuses on data
analysis for strategic decision making. This is the essence of business
intelligence.
Your group should focus
either on Knowledge Management or Business Intelligence.
Knowledge Management
There are major issues associated with KM.
Domain experts are busy--why would they drop what they are doing to help
someone else? If knowledge is power, how do organizations motivate people to
share their knowledge? How do organizations secure their knowledge? Accounting
controls mandate that employees access knowledge on a
"need to know basis", yet this is antithetical to the principles of
KM. In other words, KM is immersed in politics!
Your group might start out with the dollars
spent on KM, what KM is and is not (Warning: Knowledge Management is NOT equivalent
to an Intranet. Explain the difference to the audience.) Some conceptual
pictures of knowledge management are helpful. The first image is a very generic
pyramid of knowledge. The second
image is very rich conceptually because it also shows the stakeholders in the
organization responsible for knowledge management.
Source: http://www.lsc.co.uk/defence/index.html?3_6_knowledge-management.html~MainFrame viewed
Dec 19, 2006
Source: http://www.aib.it/aib/contr/bottin1c.gif
viewed Dec 19, 2006
Your group might start with the dollars
spent on KM, the promised benefits, and the challenges/costs/risks of
implementing KM systems, etc.
Your group might then focus on a few case
studies of how organizations are implementing knowledge management. Include a
description of:
- Size of company in terms of sales and profits
- Major products the company sells
- General characteristics of their customers
- Organizational chart--who does the CIO report to?
- How many people work for the IT organization?
- What is the annual IT budget?
The Knowledge management
case should include:
- Knowledge management strategy
- Technology used to support km
- Degree of success and failure of the KM system
- How does the company motivate domain experts to share knowledge?
- How does the company balance knowledge security with the ideas of
open information sharing?
- Lessons learned by the company
It would be great if we could see the
screen captures of the Knowledge Management System.
Finally, your group should
find and generate a list of best practices for knowledge management.
Helpful reading:
Scott, J., Globe, A., and Schiffner, K., "Jungles and Gardens:
The Evolution of Knowledge Management at J.D. Edwards," MIS Quarterly Executive, Vol. 3,
1, 2004, pp. 37-52.
The case clearing houses
have several good knowledge management case studies.
Business Intelligence
The group may begin by briefly explaining
the Business Intelligence concept, presenting statistics on the dollars spent
on business intelligence, the promised benefits of business intelligence, and
major challenges. Your group should
show how BI entails significant technical extracts from existing systems and
combining and loading clean data into a business intelligence system that
focuses on data analysis for strategic decision making. For example, the following picture shows
a conceptual picture of BI:
Source: http://www.piiglobal.com/images/logo_bi.jpg viewed
on Dec 19, 2006
Your presentation should proceed with two or
three case studies of organizations' business intelligence. (Preferably
original case studies but secondary case studies are available)
Case studies should include the Company
Background:
- Size of company in terms of sales and profits
- Major products the company sells
- General characteristics of their customers
- Organizational chart--who does the CIO report to?
- How many people work for the IT organization?
- What is the annual IT budget?
The business intelligence
aspect of the case study should include:
- Picture and good description of the organization's Business
Intelligence
- Who is responsible for Business Intelligence
- Specific example of how Business Intelligence is used
- What are the perceived benefits and limitations of the Business Intelligence
as described by IT managers/business managers
- What plans does the organization have for the future of the Business
Intelligence
- Lessons learned by the company
Other potential ideas for the presentation:
- A brief overview or demonstration of Business Intelligence software
(10 minutes or less)
- Major BI suppliers (products, services, revenues, profits)
The group should end the
presentation on best practices for creating effective Business Intelligence
systems, then map how your cases fit into best practices. This is essentially a cross-case comparison
that integrates your primary (case studies) and secondary (journal articles
& books) research.
If you have other creative
ideas, please feel free to discuss them with me.
Some helpful readings:
Mika Hannula,
Virpi Pirttimaki.
"Business Intelligence:
Empirical Study on top 50 Finnish Companies," Journal of
Jaideep Srivastava, Robert
Cooley, "Web Business
Intelligence,"
INFORMS Journal on Computing. Linthicum:
Spring 2003. Vol. 15, Iss. 2; p. 191
W F Cody, J T Kreulen, V Krishna, W S Spangler., "The integration of business intelligence and knowledge management," IBM Systems Journal. Armonk: 2002. Vol. 41, Iss. 4; p. 697 (17 pages).