A Cube of Business Information

Business intelligence plays a central role in producing up-to-date information for operative and strategic decision-making. It is common knowledge that quality business information is a manager's essential resource. Operating with business information is what business intelligence is all about. The information is usually categorized into data, information, knowledge, intelligence, and even wisdom and truth. This categorization seems to be useful when analyzing the value of information. However, for business purposes and the scientific activities in business-oriented disciplines, this kind of a categorization seems not to be very pragmatic. An alternative way is to categorize the information in the following dimensions: whether the source of information is inside or outside the organization, whether the subject of information is inside or outside the organization, and whether the type of information is qualitative or quantitative.