When we talk about Business Intelligence, concepts like Data Warehouse, OLAP, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Mining come to mind. They are all good examples of tools that can significantly improve an organization's ability to make business decisions.
These concepts are grouped under the umbrella of the so-called "Collaborative Business Intelligence", which allows us to manage knowledge, and not just information. Therefore, these types of tools will be fundamental for the new information and knowledge society that is becoming a reality.
A Business Intelligence solution must integrate structured and quantitative information (numbers) with unstructured information (text), allowing users to easily share, redefine and reuse that knowledge that was previously so difficult to locate.
A Business Intelligence project can be broken down into two phases. A first of development, and a second of implantation and use. In this last phase, employees will learn to share traditional information and give it added value and a context that will turn it into knowledge.
Of course the objective of all this is to manage knowledge for action, that is, for decision making. Any knowledge that is captured and not used in real life is of no value. At least from the point of view of the company.
We all know how many obstacles we face when making decisions in today's environment. Some of these obstacles are related to knowledge, others to learning,… in short, it is becoming increasingly complex to make informed decisions in such a changing context.
The evolution of all the concepts that we mentioned at the beginning is "Business Intelligence", but it goes much further. The idea is to combine support for data management and analysis, with the creation, capture, organization, access and use of knowledge, that is, with Organizational Knowledge Management.
The “ Collaborative Business Intelligence ” unites the structured world of numbers with the unstructured world of text, and increases the added value of both. The reports produced by a “Business Intelligence” tool can be obtained through the Web, but they can also be obtained in a collaborative context together with other information for decision-making. This allows the organization to learn from its history and its "Best Practices".
Currently, corporate portals are tools that can facilitate the location of any type of information that may be relevant when making a decision. In addition, the web allows something fundamental: a continuous update of content in a simple way. Using these tools, users can quickly locate all the information they need in increasingly shorter periods of time.
These corporate portals, in which all this information and documentation are concentrated in web format, allow for extremely powerful searches and have mechanisms to report all changes that occur in the content. The “Collaborative Business Intelligence” is an excellent way to get information, without worrying about its location, and transmit it to a large number of people who can be located anywhere in the world.
