Organisations seek to use information intelligently and to generate business intelligence for future profitable prospects. Although not regarded as business intelligence per se, there is a role for commercially produced online information sources and internally generated intranet resources in business intelligence activity. For example, the human post-coordination of raw data from a commercial source may direct business decisions; Web pages on intranets serve to unify ‘grey’ internal company information; the company intranet serves as a platform for unifying internal and external sources. However, technological and cultural barriers can inhibit the effectiveness of online information sources held on company networks, and other processes, such as the mining of transactional data, offer alternative means of deriving business intelligence. For those involved in the provision of business information, ultimately it is the question of what to provide at the point of application that is most important when attempting to create business intelligence from online information sources.
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