Information System
And Strategy
Knowledge Management,
Business Intelligence &
Business Analytics

 Knowledge management includes the processes
necessary to generate, capture, codify, and
transfer knowledge across the organization to
achieve competitive advantage.
 Business intelligence (BI) is the term used to
describe the set of technologies and processes
that use data to understand and analyze business
performance.
 Business analytics is the term used to refer to
the use of quantitative and predictive models and
fact-based management to drive decisions. It can
be considered subset of BI.

Knowledge
 Knowledge is a mix of contextual information,
experiences, rules, and values.
 Richer, deeper, and more valuable.

Tacit vs Explicit Knowledge
 Tacit* knowledge is personal, context-specific
and hard to formalize and communicate
– A (knowledge) developed and internalized by the
knower over a long period of time - incorporates so
much accrued and embedded learning that its rules
may be impossible to separate from how an individual
acts.
*understood or implied without being stated

 Explicit knowledge can be easily collected,
organized and transferred through digital
means.
– A theory of the world, conceived of as a set of all of
the conceptual entities describing classes of
objects, relationships, processes, and behavioral
norms.

Tacit Knowledge
•Knowing how to identify the
key issues necessary to solve a
problem
•Applying similar experiences
from past situations
•Estimating work required
based on intuition & experience
•Deciding on an appropriate
course of action
Explicit Knowledge
•Procedures listed in a manual
•Books and articles
•News reports and financial
statements
•Information left over from past
projects

Applying Knowledge
Management
 KM is not a new concept, but one
reinvigorated by IT such as collaborative
systems, the Internet and intranets.
 KM is still an emerging discipline
 Ultimately, an organization’s only sustainable
competitive advantage lies how its employees
apply knowledge to business problems
 KM is not a magic bullet and cannot solve all
business problems.

Factors to consider in Knowledge
Management
 Information and knowledge have become the
fields in which businesses compete.
 Managing knowledge provides value to
organizations in several:
– Sharing Best Practice
– Globalization
– Rapid Change
– Downsizing
– Managing Information Overload
– Knowledge Embedded in Products
– Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Sharing Best Practices
 Sharing best practices means leveraging the
knowledge gained by a subset of the
organization.
 Increasingly important in organizations who
depend on applying their expertise such as
accounting, consulting and training firms.
 KM systems capture best practices to
disseminate their experience within the firm.
 Problems often arise from employees who may
be reluctant to share their knowledge (managers
must encourage and reward open sharing).

Globalization
 Decrease cycle times for global processes since
information moves faster than physical process
components
 Manage global competitive pressures
 Provide global access to knowledge
 Adapt to local conditions

Rapid Change
 Build on previous work to make company more
agile (flexible)
 Sense and respond to changes more quickly
 Customize preexisting solutions for unique
customer needs

Insurance for Downsizing
 Protect from loss of knowledge when workers
leave
 Provide portability for workers who move
between roles
 Reduce time for knowledge acquisition

Managing Information Overload
 Filter data to assimilate relevant knowledge
into the company
 Provide organization and storage for easier
data retrieval

Embedded Knowledge from
Products
 Use smart products to gather product
information automatically for use in refining
product, maintenance, upgrades and customer
usage.
 Information system embedded in products
 Add value through intangibles such as fixing
systems before customer knows it’s broken

Sustainable Competitive Advantage
 Shorten the life cycle of innovation
 KM is the way to do this. Shorter innovation life
cycles keep companies ahead of the
competition.

Business Intelligence
 Traditional business intelligence (BI) has been
associated with providing dashboards and
reports to assist managers in monitoring key
performance metrics.
 Common elements of BI systems include
reporting, querying, dashboards, and
scorecards.

Business Analytics - Components

Competing with Business Analytics
 Hard to duplicate
– Because successfully using analytics to compete
means having a strong culture and organizational
support system, as well as business processes that
utilize the results of the analytical analyses, copying
the capability is difficult, if not impossible.
– A competitor may have the same tools, but success
comes from how they are used.

 Uniqueness
– There are many ways to use business analytics to
compete. A specific business will choose a path
based on their business, their strategy, their market,
their competitors, and their industry.

 Adaptability
– Successful companies use analytics across
boundaries and in creative ways. Workers are not
held back from using analytics, and in fact are
encouraged to find new and innovative ways to
apply their tools.
– By creating a culture of analytics, virtually everyone
in the organization seeks applications for analytics
to enhance their business operations.

 Better than competition
– Some organizations are better at applying analytics
than others. For example, the New Zealand cricket
team is known to use analytics, especially when it
comes to the toss decision. Pakistan on the other
hand is not known for this.

 Renewability
– Agility is an important characteristic of sustainable
competitive advantage. Companies who use
analytics for competitive advantage are
exceptionally adaptable, continuously reinvest, and
constantly renew their capabilities.

Social Analytics
 Gathering BI from social platforms to perform
analytics.
 Key points:
– Listening to the community—identify and monitor all
conversations in the social Web on a particular topic or
brand.
– Learning who is in the community—learn customer
demographics such as age, gender, location, and other
trends to foster closer relationship with community.
– Engaging people in the community—communicate
directly with customers on social platforms such as
Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter using a single
app.

– Tracking what is being said—measure and track
demographics, conversations, sentiment, status,
and customer voice using a dashboard and other
reporting tools
– Search term interest and insights—to understand
the interest over time of a search term, regional
interest in the term, top searches for terms of similar
category, and popularity of similar terms.
– Advertising support and management—to identify
the best ways to spend advertising resources for
online media

Questions??