In this white paper
Introduction 2
A brief history of business intelligence 2
Defining the business intelligence competency center 3
Establishing the BICC roles 3
The BICC support organization 4
How the BICC works 5
Conclusion: Next steps 7
From the data center to the
competency center:
Business intelligence in transition
By treating BI as an ongoing business process—and not merely as a series of discrete IT projects that end upon implementation—and by aligning your organization to getter serve this process, you can get more out of your BI investments.
Introduction
Despite its origins within IT, business intelligence (BI) is not just about technology. It is about business processes and using information to make better business decisions. Technology merely supports the chief goal of BI, which is to provide business users with insight into company operations. That insight can be gained by accessing and analyzing information previously locked away in legacy databases. By treating BI as an ongoing business process—and not merely as a series of discrete IT projects that end upon implementation—and by aligning your organization to better serve this process, you can get more out of your BI investments.
In this white paper, BearingPoint explains the importance of establishing a business intelligence competency center (BICC) staffed by personnel with the right business, analytical and technical skills to support the BI processes. By creating a BICC, organizations can align their BI initiatives with corporate strategic goals. In addition, organizations can get more from their investments in BI by more effectively leveraging their information assets for competitive advantage.
A brief history of business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) first emerged as an IT-centric solution to a decades-old problem: How to respond more quickly to user requests for data from legacy systems. Since only highly technical people had the skills to perform database queries, most organizations faced a substantial backlog of user requests for data. By building data warehouses and providing easy-to-use tools to extract data and build reports, IT was— in theory—finally able to satisfy business users’ need for timely access to data that had previously been locked up beyond their reach.
Even with new and better tools, many BI projects failed. The problem: The projects were designed and built based on inadequate business knowledge from IT and the mistaken belief that “if we build it, they will come.” Such systems frequently did not do what the users wanted or needed. Worse, the BI solutions were not aligned with the organiza-tions’ overall business strategies.
All this is changing. Today, many businesses are moving BI out of the IT division and are creating BI-centric organizations—business intelligence competency centers (BICCs)— staffed with business and technical personnel. For BI initiatives to be fully in sync with corporate strategies, they need to be managed by personnel with business and analyt-ical skills in addition to technanalyt-ical acumen. By elevating responsibility and sponsorship for these BICCs to C-level management, organizations can increase their competitive advantage by providing the right people in the organization with the right information at the right time. This can help BI projects yield a higher return on investment. BearingPoint believes that, to have a well-functioning BI portfolio, organizations must know what questions their users want answered and understand the data they can use to answer those questions. The BICC’s main responsibility is to keep up to date on the information needs of the organization, making sure its BI systems are indeed answering the right questions and giving users the information they need to steer the company in the right direction.
who possess skills in three different categories (Figure 1):
• Business skills. Business knowledge is a key component to the BICC. Personnel must understand the organization’s overall business model and key business processes, as well as the marketplace in which it competes. Rather than simply being subject matter experts (SMEs) in a certain area—say, finance or logistics—people employed in the BICC must understand the business as a whole. Generally, these are customer-facing professionals, such as marketing and sales line managers, who have the ability to tap into the knowledge of SMEs for each functional business area in the
organization.
• Analytical skills. In order to derive the greatest benefit from the information collected by the BI systems, BICC personnel should have advanced analytical skills. Statisticians or other professionals who know how to consolidate information across domains and perform trend analyses would be good candidates for working in the BICC.
• Technical skills. Different skills are needed to support business and analytical systems than what are typically needed for maintaining operational systems. Although personnel who provide the technical foundation for the BICC are likely to come from the IT department, they should be familiar with BI and have some business understanding and business interest, rather than simply being hard-core technologists.
The number of people staffed in the BICC can be distributed unequally among these skills; as long as all three skill sets are represented, the BICC can fulfill its intended function.
Establishing the BICC roles
There are also a number of organizational roles within the BICC. Depending on the specific needs of the business, these roles can be staffed by people with varying combinations of the three necessary skill sets outlined above.
The four mandatory organizational roles are:
• BICC leader. The BICC leader is in charge of the BICC’s day-to-day operations and reports directly to the BICC sponsor, who is generally a director or C-level executive. He or she should be able to present a compelling “sales pitch” to users about the benefits of BI. The BICC leader also should have leadership experience, since he or she will be responsible for the entire BI portfolio.
• Business analyst. The business analyst keeps track of all the business and analytical knowledge that is available to the BICC. This role requires a combination of strong business and analytical skills. The business analyst serves as a liaison to the organiza-tion’s SMEs and analytical and business experts.
• Technical advisor. The technical advisor serves as the lead IT representative in the BICC. Experience with BI systems, data warehouse architectures and software development are key skills for the technical advisor to possess. In addition to technical competencies, the technical advisor should possess a strong interest in the organiza-tion’s business. BICC Business skills Analytical skills Technical skills
Figure 2. BICC support organization
Maintaining the BI portfolio is a business-critical task that should be prioritized accordingly.
• Data steward. The data steward is in charge of maintaining the business’ information assets, including providing oversight of data models and data quality. This latter responsibility is an important one, since most organizations struggle with data quality issues. The data steward monitors and makes corrections as necessary to information and manages the data model—preferably by verifying information against the source systems from which the BI system draws its information. The data steward also must have the ability to get beyond the technical aspects of the data model to understand how that data impacts the business.
It’s essential that the staffed resources are dedicated to the BICC as part of their job responsibilities and are not just “on loan” from other business units. We often see personnel with one role in the BICC and another role in another business unit, with no clearly defined balance between the two, getting pulled in the direction of the business unit. When this happens, the BICC responsibilities suffer. Maintaining the BI portfolio is a business-critical task that should be prioritized accordingly.
The BICC support organization
In addition to these core roles, the BICC should also have a strong support organization (Figure 2).
Information Management
BICC leader
Technical advisor
Business analyst Data steward
BICC administrative assistant Subject matter expert 1 Subject matter expert 2 Subject matter expert 3 Subject matter expert 4 BI expert Data warehouse architect Developer System 1 System 2 System 3
BICC core roles BICC support organization
of the organization.
• The business analyst should have a panel of SMEs from various business functions with whom to consult. Those SMEs should have part-time responsibilities within the BICC to facilitate communication and transfer business processes and information between the business units and the BICC.
• The technical advisor heads all the technical personnel in the BICC.
• The data steward should have a panel of personnel who can communicate data issues back to the source systems.
In addition to these four core roles and their respective support organizations, the BICC needs support services from IT, including technical personnel such as database administrators who spend a large portion of their time working within the BICC. When pressed for time, IT resources have a tendency to solve problems in the operational systems first, neglecting the BI systems. For this reason, it is crucial that management commits to having IT people who are dedicated to maintaining and supporting BI systems.
How the BICC works
The BICC’s primary role is to maintain the organization’s BI strategy; align the BI strategy with the organization’s business strategy; and establish that any investment in BI technology adds value to the organization and helps the organization meet its strategic goals. The BICC typically serves as a program office for new BI initiatives, coordinating efforts between different projects, facilitating knowledge sharing among all personnel working on BI initiatives, and playing an active role in BI system development, both as an advisor and as a participant in producing deliverables. Anything that adds value to the BI portfolio falls into the BICC’s area of responsibility.
But it’s important to understand that the BICC’s responsibility does not end with BI projects. The BICC also should be responsible for releasing finished BI products from development to production, maintaining and upgrading the systems, fixing bugs, correcting erroneous data, and adjusting calculations, as necessary. Finally, the BICC should play a major role in promoting the existing system portfolio and BI initiatives to the rest of the organization and should offer training and support to all BI business users.
Businesses with less-mature BI utilization typically create a “virtual” BICC with personnel dedicated only part-time to the BICC organization. Enterprises with a more mature approach to BI need a real, fixed BICC unit with personnel dedicated 100 percent to carrying out their BICC duties.
Enterprises with a more mature approach to BI need a real,
fixed BICC unit with personnel dedicated 100 percent to
carrying out their BICC duties.
There is no universal blueprint for building
a BICC; it needs to be tailored to the size of
your organization and your BI ambitions.
your organization and your BI ambitions. The key is to lift the responsibility for BI out of IT and provide a supporting organizational unit that will give the BI systems the visibility, attention and support needed to connect them effectively with the organization as a whole.
Businesses can begin to build a BICC by following these steps:
• Establish leadership. Find someone to serve as program director for all BI projects under development, as well as owner of the BI systems that have already been implemented. That person must then get C-level commitment to sponsor the BICC. • Define the overall BI strategy. The BICC must define a clear business goal to drive the
organization’s BI efforts. The BI strategy will also help shape the BICC and its purpose. • Build business skills into the BICC. IT needs to be complemented by business skills.
This involves finding people within the organization who have a detailed understanding of the overall business, as well as a passion for BI.
• Set incremental goals. As with all initiatives connected with business intelligence and information management, you need to think big and start small. This is especially true for organizations that do not have deep BI experience. These organizations need to define a clear strategy that is aligned with the corporate strategy, and grow incrementally.
BearingPoint believes that a sign of a well-functioning BICC is the ability of an organization’s BI systems to answer the questions business users are asking in a timely manner. This is already happening. Many businesses have started moving BI out of IT and have created promising BICCs that are boosting the visibility of BI throughout the organization. More critically, by elevating responsibility for these BICCs to C-level management, they are able to get more out of their BI initiatives and, in the end, build competitive advantage for the business as a whole.
business intelligence and information management, you need to think big and start small.
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www.bearingpoint.dk
To get there. Together.
BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy managed and owned by its Partners throughout Europe. Serving commercial, financial and public services clients, BearingPoint focuses on offering its clients the best possible value in terms of tangible, measurable results by leveraging business and technology expertise. Its seamless cross-border approach, an entrepreneurial culture, long-standing relations with reputable organisations, profound industry and functional knowledge as well as solutions customised to clients specific needs make the company a truly trusted adviser. BearingPoint has European roots, but operates with a global reach.
We are BearingPoint, management and technology consultants. To learn more, visit our Web site at www.bearingpoint.com.
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