Integrating knowledge and insights into business intelligence systems

Business Intelligence (BI) and Knowledge Management (KM) systems are often perceived as two independent IS domains. BI systems improve decision-making and the gaining of competitive advantage (Elbashir et al., 2008), while KM systems have also been identified by Herschel and Jones (2005) as useful for supporting decision making processes of the administrative leadership
in organizations. Beyond that, we suggest that integration of BI and KM may offer substantial organizational benefits, above and beyond the contribution of each alone. To assess this proposition, this study explores a conceptual design of a system that integrates knowledge and insight into BI tools, under the premise that such integration can improve BI usability, better support decision making, and enhance the organizational knowledge derived from data usage.
Several studies have examined the possibility of integrating BI and KM (e.g., Bolloju et al., 2002; Cody et al., 2002, Herschel and Jones, 2005), suggesting that such integration will improve DSS capabilities and promote the formation of “organizational memory” repository. The suggested integration is based on a metadata repository, which capture knowledge and insights accumulated
during the usage of BI tools. This centralized BI-related knowledge repository will also enable the sharing of knowledge and insights among interested parties within the organization, and possibly with external stakeholders as well. The purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which such integration can enhance decision processes and improve their outcomes. This was examined by a laboratory experiment, which is currently in the result analyzing phase.