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Top1. Introduction
Modern times are considered to be the era of information and knowledge, and the economy is becoming more and more the knowledge-based one. After the agrarian era, industrial era, there was a post-industrial era, also called a knowledge-based era. In the Knowledge-Based Economy (KBE), it is essential to have and use adequate managerial knowledge at the right time.
Knowledge is becoming one of the most valuable resources. Since about 80s of the twentieth century, we live in a time characterized by rapid acceleration of civilization, which manifests itself, inter alia, in disseminating the use of IT not only in business practice, but also in everyday life. This is possible due to progress in the fields of computer manufacturing and telecommunications, as well as the appropriate software, and is primarily the result of increasing demands associated with growing market requirements, and hence the need to meet these requirements. It is necessary to keep up in an increasingly competitive market. Meeting the demand for information and knowledge available at the right time for the decision maker who is able to take advantage of it, seems to be not an easy task to fulfill.
Effective management of public institutions is currently one of the biggest challenges that modern economy is facing. Decision-makers of public sector entities have to meet the growing expectations of citizens, entrepreneurs, officials and employees. On the one hand, managers of public institutions need to focus on “proper goal setting and results monitoring, financial management, defining standards of the services provided, taking advantage of benchmarking solutions, a proper management of human resources imposed by the concept of the new public management” (Bobińska, 2012), and directing these actions to meet the needs of citizens, while, on the other hand, improving the efficiency of the decision-making process, supported by an intelligent IT solution, which allows to make multidimensional business analysis to ensure comprehensiveness of solving a given business issue.
Business Intelligence as a very modern technology using the latest innovations in the field of IT, seems to be the one that can provide the necessary information and knowledge.
Sources for the Business Intelligence technologies can be divided in two categories: internal – like databases, data files from the organization’s assets, and external – from the Internet. BI technology processes data from different data sources by OLAP analysis, data mining or reports. In most local government units, there are implemented such information systems as ERP, CRM, budgeting, financial analysis, sales analysis, marketing analysis, balanced scorecards, etc., to support their everyday work. These systems or rather their databases constitute the data sources for the BI processes. That is why we can say that the BI technologies occupy the central place among management information systems in an organization (Nycz, 2013).