With tools such as data warehousing and data mining at their disposal, businesses are learning how to use information to their advantage. The term business intelligence is used to describe the process that organizations use to take data they are collecting and analyze it in the hopes of obtaining a competitive advantage. Besides using data from their internal databases, firms often purchase information from data brokers to get a big-picture understanding of their industries. Business analytics is the term used to describe the use of internal company data to improve business processes and practices.
Knowledge Management
the concept of knowledge management (KM). All companies accumulate knowledge over the course of their existence. Some of this knowledge is written down or saved, but not in an organized fashion. Much of this knowledge is not written down; instead, it is stored inside the heads of its employees. Knowledge management is the process of formalizing the capture, indexing, and storing of the company’s knowledge in order to benefit from the experiences and insights that the company has captured during its existence.