Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is different from competitive intelligence. Whereas competitive intelligence has the restricted scope of identifying competitors and their marketing strategies or tactics, business intelligence has a much wider scope.
For example, it might be more helpful to get insights into customer behavior and the nuances that affect customers’ buying decisions than the fact that a major competitor is cutting his price. The insights into customer behavior could help you to make an offer that would be bought even at a higher price.
Business intelligence or BI is also not restricted to the marketing area. Such things as production bottlenecks, new technolgies relevant to the business and operating costs, affect profits. BI would seek to provide information about all such profit-affecting factors. In the marketing area, BI seeks to keep the organization up-to-date on emerging market conditions, such as changing fashions.
BI has been defined as the knowledge derived from analyzing an organization’s information ( http://planning.ucsc.edu/irps/dwh/DWHGLOSS.HTM ).
How Does BI Help Business?
Information about you customers, their preferences and typical daily routines, can help you design offers that cater better to their expectations and also to get this offer in front of them using more precise (and less expensive) means. This can lead to higher sales volumes and even better profit margins.
On the factory floor, if you know the specific factors the lead to low productivity, such as poor maintenance practices or inadequate operator training, you can direct remedial actions to the real problem. In the absence of BI on what is happening on the shop floor, you might arrive at superficial conclusions about the productivity problem. That could lead to a wrong remedial focus and wasted time and money.
The situation is the same in other business result areas. The more insights you can get into the factors that affect performance, the better you can develop solutions to achieve greater effectiveness. It is these insights that Business Intelligence seeks to provide.
Where Do Enterprise Content Management Systems Come In?
ECM systems have two major features that help generate better Business Intelligence.
ECM seeks to include unstructured content, like word-processed documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, audio and video files and so on in its content repository. Each piece of content would have metadata associated with it that helps bring it up as relevant when the content repository is searched in different contexts.
This means that when you investigate a problem, you can review all relevant material, instead of just the reports that your functional applications generate.
Secondly, the ECM content repository is optimized for querying and analysis, as distinct from standard application databases designed for speedy transaction entry and processing.
This means that you could query the content repository in customized ways, and do that extensively without fear that you are slowing down transactions processing.
Enterprise Content Management systems also make the content available on a global scale, for access by its personnel located all over the world (or even on the road). Also, content generated all across the enterprise goes into the content repository with no major delays. It would thus be possible for a marketing executive traveling to Asia to analyze the latest market trends in a particular Asian market before reaching his or her destination.
Business Intelligence is the knowledge about the business and its environment, derived by analyzing business information. Enterprise Content Management systems create a more comprehensive content repository, and also configure the repository specifically for querying and analysis. ECM thus helps to make better business intelligence available all across the enterprise.