Business knowledge is continually evolving

Malcolm Ryder has some fun with Business Intelligence versus Business Knowledge: Who Cares?

To ultimately gain maximum advantage through information, we'll need our firm to become an intelligent enterprise that is also a learning organization constantly testing and improving its perspective.

As usual, his post has a couple illustrations to highlight what he's thinking.  With those, he does a nice job of highlighting the importance of data AND knowledge; how intelligence is not synonymous with knowledge; cognition; learning; experience.

I particularly like his thoughts about business intelligence, or more accurately, the process of seeing patterns in the constant wave of data, information and knowledge.  It's not just a one time process; it is iterative.  We see some new signals and think we recognize an idea or pattern.  That pattern repeats in various forms and we generalize (or narrow) the pattern into concepts.  We then see if those concepts apply to new situations and potentially reveal something we didn't know before.  With that knowledge we continue to observe and process and learn.

Humans work this way, as do organizations, though I get the impression that it's much harder for organizations to hit the groove of continuous learning.