6. Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management (by JON DORRINGTON)

Would you make a critical business decision if you didn’t have sufficient information? Of course not, but that’s what you’re doing if you haven’t incorporated business intelligence into your knowledge management (KM) system. You’d be using a limited amount of data to make potentially critical business decisions, and that’s not a smart business practice. So how do you get the information you need?

What’s Business Intelligence?

At Seagate Software of Scotts Valley, Calif., where I work, we define business intelligence (BI) as software that enables organizations to access, analyze, report, and share information in data warehouses and databases. The goal of BI: to develop insights and improve decision-making. BI technologies include ad hoc query, enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

The BI sector is one of the fastest growing areas of the software industry; BI’s annual revenues are expected to grow from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $6.2 billion by 2002, according to GartnerGroup, the Stamford, Conn., market research firm. Through BI, all sorts of companies, including such well-known names as Boeing, FedEx, Aetna, Pepsi-Cola, and Deutsche Bank are making smarter, more informed business decisions and increasing their competitive advantage. These companies, which have invested significantly in groupware, recognize that information from a data warehouse, enterprise resource planning system, or Lotus Domino application becomes inherently more valuable when it can be accessed and analyzed by the people who need it.

We at Seagate Software consider BI to be one of the five pillars of KM, along with knowledge discovery and mapping, expertise location, collaboration, and knowledge transfer. A KM system is built on these pillars and wouldn’t be fully functional without them. In short, BI is the missing link in the chain that transforms corporate data into information, and information into knowledge.

One way it does this is by unifying a company’s information management systems. A company might be using Notes/Domino for messaging and groupware while their transactional data is being captured through a multimillion-dollar SAP system. For IT professionals, the challenge is to link those systems in such a way as to enable users to make more informed decisions.

BI and Notes/Domino

BI software supports and complements Lotus technology by allowing users to access and analyze structured data from their Notes/Domino environment. Users can easily create and share presentation-quality reports from that data. For the millions of Lotus users who want to hook up their database and KM systems, BI is the missing link.

For example, imagine a sales manager who periodically reviews his salespeople’s salaries and bonuses for fairness and possible adjustment. The manager will undoubtedly want to consult performance reviews and other notes on his employees, which are shared securely with the human resources department in a Notes/Domino environment. He’ll also want to see last year’s sales figures for each salesperson and perhaps compare this data with the previous year’s sales figures, stored in the company’s SAP system.

In addition, he’ll probably want to take a look at industry data that list average salaries and bonuses for salespeople—information that the human resources department also houses within Notes. Since many factors may have an impact on sales, he may want to perform a sophisticated analysis of his employees’ sales figures to delve deeper into their performance.

Using BI software, such as Seagate Info and Seagate Crystal Reports, the sales manager can access and analyze the SAP data, combine it with the Lotus data he already has, and easily create a report. This report, combined with the performance reviews, industry statistics, and internal HR policies, gives him all the tangible the information he needs to make the right decisions about salary and bonuses.

In case you’re concerned about the effect BI may have on the performance of your Domino system, don’t worry: specially designated servers can help out. For instance, Seagate Info provides an infrastructure that offloads the processing of reports and other information to servers designed to manage BI requirements.

BI and Lotus

Now that you can see why BI is so important to a KM environment, you may be wondering what groupware companies like Lotus think of this missing link. Have they bought into BI?

The answer is yes. Seagate Software works closely with Lotus to provide access and analysis of data to their users. Strategic alliances like this one has resulted in BI products that not only complement Notes/Domino but also support other Lotus products, including Lotus Enterprise Integrator, Domino Enterprise Connection Services, and Domino Connectors.

BI, combined with a collaborative workflow system, is critical to turning data into knowledge. In a society where knowledge is power, a strategy that complements KM with BI can give your company a significant competitive advantage.

JON DORRINGTON is business development manager at Seagate Software of Scotts Valley, Calif., which develops business intelligence software.

E-mail: jon.dorrington@seagatesoftware.com.