Enterprise applications Toolkit

Reaping business intelligence's harvest

David Braue ZDNet Australia

Published: 05 Jan 2004 11:59 GMT

Building BI competence
Clearly, the ideal of a central data repository provides the most promise of meeting the demands of enterprise reporting by storing one version of every piece of information in a single accessible place. In recent years, delivering on this vision became physically possible through storage area networks (SANs) that consolidated data from multiple servers; ERP systems that logically centralised key business information; and data warehouses, which provided data solidarity by organising key data into a single database that could be readily analysed.

None of these technologies has succeeded in overcoming internal business multiplicity, however. To this end, BI advocates are now pushing the consolidation of business intelligence assets into what Gartner calls a BICC (Business Intelligence Competency Centre).

In Gartner's explanation, the BICC becomes a centre of excellence for all things BI-related -- a focal point for advocacy of greater business intelligence. Rather than allowing individual departments to pursue their own strategies as they feel like it, the formation of a BICC represents executives' recognition that a more rigorous and stringent approach to BI has become necessary.

It provides both technological guidance and something of a moral high-ground from which BI advocates can force an analytics-driven way of working down through the entire company. In other words, the fight is for information efficiency, and effective BI should be the executive's weapon of choice.

But how to build a BICC? Business intelligence systems, after all, have long been the responsibility of IT departments that -- ideally -- work with individual departments to build systems that suit their needs. Even the fact that BI has been handled this way reflects the inappropriate structure of most businesses.

Maintenance teams, after all, are given responsibility for changing locks or fixing air conditioners; actuaries are called upon to formally quantify risk exposure; and production managers are charged with making sure supplies get where and when they're needed. So why should BI, which is arguably important as a source of business information in the same way that manufacturing drives business sales, be treated any differently?

Don't be afraid to put some effort into it. A proper BICC should be staffed by technology experts skilled in both the whys and wherefores of specific BI technologies, and in the over-reaching business needs that drive adoption of those technologies. Train your technology people in business understanding and analytical skills; create BI policies that route authority and responsibility for analytics projects through the BICC department; and give the BICC the authority to push the use of BI tools as a means of improving interaction between operationally separate business units.

This approach will give both policy backing and moral weight to the BICC, which will be in a better position to centralise data management and track the technological discrepancies between departments.