Managing and Using Information System

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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, AND ANALYTICS

Business intelligence and analytics are quickly becoming a source of strategic advantage for those firms who understand and develop skills to manage big data. This chapter provides an overview of the ways businesses make decisions. Making better decisions begins by differentiation between knowledge management, business intelligence and analytics, including a discussion of intellectual property. Data, information, and knowledge (both tacit and explicit) are then defined and discussed, as they are the foundation of making better decisions. Managing knowledge is done through four main processes, which are outlined next. Competing with analytics, and the capabilities that enable it, follows. The chapter then takes a more technical turn, addressing the components of business analytics and big data amassed in data warehouses. The chapter concludes with a discussion of social analytics and caveats that managers must anticipate.

Caesars Entertainment Corporation, the largest gaming company in the world by some measures, found a way to more than double revenues by collecting and then analyzing customer data. According to CEO Gary Loveman, “We've come out top in the casino wars by mining our customer data deeply, running marketing experiments, and using the results to implement finely tuned marketing and service delivery strategies ...