Triangle of Business Intelligence, Performance Measurement and Knowledge Management

Recent significant changes in the business environment, e.g. the globalisation of markets, ever faster technological developments and the increased importance of knowledge-based assets, have brought about new managerial challenges. This has resulted in the emergence of new management concepts and tools, such as performance measurement, business intelligence and knowledge management. These concepts are expected to be better suited to the development of an organisation’s performance in a modern business environment. The new management tools have been developed to solve different problems from different managerial points of view. Simply stated, performance measurement deals with the implementation of an organisation’s strategy; business intelligence deals with the gathering and analysis of the vast amount of information in and around the organisation; and knowledge management is about managing information and competencies in the organisation. Despite the different viewpoints of these methods, they seem to share several connective elements. However, hardly any research has focused on how these newly developed tools relate to each other. This paper defines and enlightens the unambiguous concepts of performance measurement, business intelligence and knowledge management, and illustrates how these tools are related to each other. The main question is how and for what purposes the three methods are supposed to be used. In conclusion, a framework of the uses of these performance management tools is suggested.