The Difference Between Information, Business Intelligence and Knowledge

The Difference between Data, Information, Business Intelligence and Knowledge Introduction We can easily find all data, information, business intelligence and knowledge appearing interactively around us every day from different channels. This article is aim to identify the differences between these four concepts based on the definitions and examples. Data Data refers to raw facts that describe the characteristics of an event or object. (Baltzan, Lynch, & Blakey, 2013) It is unstructured collected figures or facts, which is meaningless without any context. For example, The Billion Dollar Gram indicates some figures, such as 500 billion for pipeline, 20 billion for the war budget. They are figures that do not make any sense, and you cannot abstract the meanings and relationship from them. Information But we can discover these essentials from the information we obtain, which is formed by data converted into a meaningful and useful context. (Baltzan et al., 2013) It is more structured and more meaningful than data is. The information we can get from the Billion Dollar Gram is Iraq War in 2003 cost American Government 60 billion which was more than the budget on that. The other example from the video is United States spent 607 billion on military budget in 2008, only be shown by this data, we may say United states has the biggest military budget. But America dropped to No.8 when consider about the ratio military budget over GDP. The information we know from the numbers can change our mind and knowledge about the real world. Business Intelligence Business Intelligence (BI) is information captured from multiple sources that analyses patterns, trends and relationships for strategic decisions making. (Baltzan et al., 2013) With BI, people can broaden and enhance the range and precision of insights and information getting from data, allowing them to take proper and relevant strategic decisions for their business. For instance, David collected information from Google Doc. and...