Many decisions of crucial importance for businesses have successfully been taken and will continue to be taken on the basis of management's "gut feeling". This gut feeling originates from management often extremely complex judgments of persons as well as profound industry- and management knowledge and -experience being processed neural inside the manager faster than even the best business intelligence system comes to perform within foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, business intelligence seem to be here to stay, and the fast access to relevant information is now crucial for core performances of many companies and institutions.

A still growing proportion of the workforce consists of "knowledge workers", and the technology has enabled rapid access to and dissemination of knowledge.

The steady increase in the relative weight of knowledge-based work has made knowledge sharing a distinct focus area for organizations’ strive for efficiency.

Also the context for the organizations – including regulatory compliance – demands more and more information about the organization.

This growing demand for knowledge and the growing access to production and distribution of knowledge has, together with other factors, created the concept of "information democracy" – everyone' access to all available relevant knowledge.

In 1997 the analysis institute Gartner® predicted, for example, that "information democracy" around the year 2000 "would emerge in forward-thinking organizations with BI information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers and the public."

Although there has been much movement since 1997 these predictions cannot be said to have completely materialized, and Gartner® and the rest of us have had to recognize that the majority of the organizations (processes and cultures) have not yet been ready for ”information democracy”. Nor does business 

intelligence tools have developed qualitatively with it by Gartner in 1997 expected speed.

Access to and use of business intelligence is still overwhelmingly, reserved for the organizations’ "information elite"; while a wide range of potential stakeholders largely is not being served.

Business intelligence-stakeholders, such as wider layers of staff, suppliers, customers and authorities, auditors and consultants have only slowly gained own access to more knowledge about the organization' situation.

Knowledge sharing — not to mention knowledge democracy – has shown to have to overcome a number of organizational and cultural barriers to its realization. Amongst other things the traditional reward structures of the organizations are only slowly changing from rewarding distribution of above monopolization of knowledge …

ebs.dk believes

ebs.dk believes that the greatest potential in the business intelligence is released by sharing knowledge widely — even with the organization’ external stakeholders, customers, suppliers and authorities. Technology – including the business intelligence tools ;-) – is in this context just part of the solution. In addition to the right tools full release of business intelligence-potential requires strong focus on the business processes desired supported and not least the necessary development of corporate culture and attitudes.

ebs.dk believes that the technical means are available, and that many organizations have achieved the necessary organizational maturity and business necessity, to release the full business intelligence-potential in effective knowledge sharing — Yes perhaps even information democracy!

In this section of ebs.dk’ website, we will publish our contribution on how to seek and exploit the full potential of business intelligence.