Use of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management, Sales Essay

Use of Business Intelligence in Knowledge Management, Sales Forecasting or Market Research - Essay Example In order to demonstrate the variations in its meaning only two of its various meanings are demonstrated as under. â€Å"Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.† (Sauder, 2011) and, â€Å"Normally describes the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data. Includes database and application technologies, as well as analysis practices. Sometimes used synonymously with "decision support," though business intelligence is technically much broader, potentially encompassing knowledge management, enterprise resource planning, and data mining, among other practices. ...† (csumb, 2011) Trying to interpret the actual meanings of the term ‘intelligence’ and how it is evolved would give us a better understanding into the terminology of business intelligence itself. Generally, intelligence refers to the ability to understand, learn and evolve. Intelligence develops with every learning experience and input of every kind of information. Basic intelligence, when deployed in business environment is referred to as business intelligence. THE DISCUSSION: The capacity of human beings to incorporate prior instinctive and experience based knowledge to execute processes in order to achieve a particular objective is termed as intelligence. It’s a virtual entity that encompasses all logical horizons. Business is also one of the natural and logical processes. Logic can be defined as a set of rules that governs executions. To discriminate a process as being logical or illogical one needs to be intelligent. This new perspective about intelligence gives a much unde rstandable definition of Business Intelligence. BI would now be defined as, the capacity that enables businessmen to differentiate logical and illogical executions in a business.. This definition presents Business Intelligence as an umbrella that covers almost all the tasks performed under the tag of ‘businesses’. This paper emphasizes on the same notion with the discussion of multiple top notch business terms namely sales forecasting, market research and knowledge management. The association of business intelligence with sales forecasting, knowledge management and Market Research brings new meanings to this seemingly simple business term. It is attempted to take a general look at the basic definitions of each of the above mentioned terms before looking at their comparative involvements and meanings. SALES FORECASTING: Sales forecasting is a well known business terminology. Integral to its existence this business process involves an insight into the future prospects of a company’s sales. These sales may be spanned over any specific amount of time may it be weekly, monthly or yearly. The importance of this vital business process can be assessed by the fact that the prospective production strategies and those involving inventory are all based upon the feedback given to the business by it sales forecasting process. It is impossible that without having an idea of the sales of a business the designing of its inventory be done. Estimates regarding