KM & Business Intelligence: The importance of integration

There has been some confusion as to whether KM is part of BI or BI is part of KM. The lack of clarity is seen to be, in part, dependent on how the two concepts are defined. Their relationship is clarified. BI focuses on explicit knowledge, but KM encompasses both tacit and explicit knowledge. Both concepts promote learning, decision-making, and understanding. Yet, KM can influence the very nature of BI itself. Hence, this paper explains the nature of the integration between BI and KM and makes clear that BI should be viewed as a subset of KM. Many in industry confuse knowledge management with business intelligence. According to a survey by OTR consultancy, 60 percent of consultants did not understand the difference between the two. Gartner consultancy clarifies this by explaining business intelligence (BI) as set of all technologies that gather and analyze data to improve decision-making. In BI, intelligence is often defined as the discovery and explanation of hidden, inherent and decision-relevant contexts in large amounts of business and economic data (Hameed, 2004). Knowledge Management (KM) is described as a systematic process of finding, selecting, organizing, distilling and presenting information in a way that improves an employee's comprehension in a specific area of interest. Knowledge management helps an organization to gain insight and understanding from its own experience. Specific knowledge management activities help focus the organization on acquiring, storing and utilizing knowledge for such things as problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning and decision making (Hameed, 2004).