Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a highly important field for organizations across all industries. A number of organizations have derived, and continue to obtain, significant benefits through the careful use of business intelligence. The following examples illustrate this emerging trend:

At Northern Europe's largest hospital—Sahlgreiiska University Hospital in Gothen­burg, Sweden—Business intelligence is used to provide doctors with a simple, easy, and, fast way to sift through test results and evaluate whether a patient recovering from brain surgery has meningitis (which is a common likely consequence of brain surgery) and how it should be treated. The Business intelligence solution takes data from a number of different places, including physical examination, tests, and other factors, and thereby precludes the need for doctors to manually go through numerous sheets of paper with details of patient histories and test results, do computations, and then reach their conclusions.

SkvTel a pager company, wanted to tackle a major cause of dissatisfaction among its clients: when they exceeded the minutes on their billing plan, they would only find out about it upon receiving their monthly bill. Skytel decided to try to contact these clients before the bill went out and offer to move them to the right payment plan. They achieved this by setting up a Business intelligence system where they could see how many pages customers were allowed, and how many they received, and then advise them. Through the use of this system, the company was able to increase customer satisfaction.

The Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) annually grants about 5 billion dollars in public assistance to some 1.2 million Michigan residents, which includes some individuals who misrepresent their situation in their applications. The information that investigators need to help expose fraud was stored across different agencies information.

Business intelligence is distinct from knowledge management and the other information technologies that are used in contemporary organizations. The earlier distinction among data, information, and knowledge is relevant in this regard.

Knowledge management (KM) refers to doing what is needed to get the most out of knowledge resources. KM focuses on creating, sharing, and applying knowledge. The traditional emphasis in KM has been on explicit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is recognized and is already articulated in some form), but, increasingly, KM has also incorporated managing important tacit knowledge (knowledge that is difficult to articulate and formalize, including insights, intui­tions, and hunches).

Questionnaire:

• What is Business intelligence? Give an example.