The role of organizational knowledge management strategies in the quest for business intelligence

Knowledge management (KM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are topics, which are receiving much currency in the literature of academia and the general media over the past several years. KM, in this paper, is explored from the perspective of the acquisition of business intelligence inside and outside the organization. An attempt is made to discuss how IT (Information Technology), and specifically, synchronous and asynchronous Groupware, may be integrated with KM in a drive towards creating BI. The term 'business intelligence' is being studied with specific relevance to the identification of business opportunities. In seeking to clarify the argument being made here, a model is presented and discussed in terms of the transformation process from KM to BI and the subsequent competitive advantage achieved. The paper also outlines ten principles, which managers may use as a template to help their organizations create a successful KM initiative. These principles focus on those systems which organizations should implement to enable managers/agents to contribute new knowledge during their natural workflow interactions. This is critical to ensure that solutions that are currently in the system can be quickly added once the resolution has been determined. The principles in question range from a definition of KM as a disciple, the process of creating a change management plan, a template for focusing on the organizations' strategic goals, approaches in setting expectations or risk extinction metrics, identification of implementation strategies for integrating KM into existing systems, and initiatives which may be used to educate an organizations' self-service users. We shall finally, discuss how the proposed KM-BI model may be used to assist an organization to become a knowledge-enabled organization.