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The Case for Business Intelligence Competency Centers

August 30, 2006

If we build it, will they come? It's a question more CIOs are asking, as they contemplate the implications of business intelligence (BI) on a broader scale. Simply providing BI to an increasing number of users doesn't guarantee more people will use it. Companies must also drive adoption to ensure its success.

Enter the Business Intelligence Competency Center, or BICC. The concept is simple: bring together working teams of IT and business users to drive the strategic value and rollout of enterprise-wide BI. Done right, it's so far proven to be the most effective way to make everyday BI actually happen.

There are two key values of the BICC. First, it promotes and delivers a consistent set of BI skills, standards, and best practices. Second, it enables repeatable, successful BI deployments – taking BI from a single-project mentality to a division or whole-organization view.

According to Gartner, many organizations have already formed BICCs to develop the resources to "move from an IT driven initiative to business-driven, cross-organization initiatives that encompass a wide range of users, customers, and partners.¹" Gartner also predicts that by 2009, over 60 percent of Global 2000 companies and government agencies with strategic BI initiatives will form BICCs.²

Addressing the culture

A BICC is more than an IT delivery mechanism for BI. It straddles business and technology, strategy and tactics; and crosses departments. In fact, the main focus isn't finding software that's scalable for the enterprise, but finding a way to make it relevant to a lot of people.

As Betsy Burton and Mark McDonald at Gartner suggest, "the greatest challenge to BI implementation lies not in the technologies, but in the organizational dynamics that must be overcome." These include issues such as different projects competing for the same funding, conflicting priorities, as well as management methodologies and skills."³

A BICC addresses the silos of user expectations and requirements by promoting a central, standardized platform and set of best practices, and by communicating BI value across departments and regions. It starts with an inventory of competencies, interests, and needs, as well as service gaps, duplication, and other critical factors. This serves as the performance baseline for BI priorities: what business needs have to be addressed, what training is required, and where can processes be improved.

Converging IT and business

It's also a learning curve for IT, since they're accustomed to being the data experts, not the business experts. Recently at a Cognos Forum roundtable on BICCs, participants discussed the different approaches of IT and business – the former tends to think of BI from the data sources outward; the latter focuses on business indicators and performance measures.

"You have to see the way people think about data, and see the differences. If you understand the two groups in this way, you can understand how they're thinking," one participant said.

A BICC team that includes both IT and people from functional business areas is critical. Without that liaison and ability to demonstrate an understanding of business needs, users will likely pursue reporting options themselves. And that leads to the plethora of reporting tools that many organizations now find so difficult. Instead, if it's a system people can use, and the BICC helps them understand how they can use it, broader BI adoption is possible.

Deployment step by step

When it comes to broad-based BI deployment, a measured approach works best: start small, think strategically, and systematically accelerate. Small simple steps will yield greater returns as users adopt the BI standard, and also drive subsequent success. And one size doesn't fit all. The scope and approach are driven by organizational needs and considerations of human capital, processes, culture, and infrastructure. But whatever the configuration, the goal is to create a business-wide consistent approach to implement, support, and manage BI.

Cognos BICC Service

Establishing a successful BICC depends on the right planning and implementation. The Cognos BICC Service provides a roadmap and services to help customers design, deploy, and operate their own BICCs based on their unique business needs.

Cognos consultants work directly with customers to either build a BICC from scratch or optimize an existing practice. The service helps organizations formulate a BICC vision and strategy, build awareness, set program objectives and measures, establish an effective framework, and become self-sufficient through best practice knowledge transfer.

"We have found the best way to bridge technology with business issues and support BI throughout our company is to form a BICC. Cognos has given us a lot of support in this area already, and we look forward to the new content and knowledge-sharing opportunities through its enhanced focus on building enterprise-wide competency," says Ton van den Dungen, manager, business intelligence and control, ENECO Energie.⁴

And from Simon Gratton, director of business intelligence at TELUS Business Transformation: "Standardization on Cognos 8 BI coupled with a common, adaptable and repeatable framework in the form of a BICC, will both reduce the total cost of ownership and act as a positive catalyst in achieving long-term success in BI implementations."⁵

Summary

Business intelligence is becoming more strategic to the business, and IT departments will increasingly need to standardize and manage deployments across divisions, regions, and functions. A BICC can provide the central knowledge, skills, and best practices to help make this broader, more integrated BI happen.

As Burton and McDonald at Gartner suggest: "The future of BI lies in the methods, practices, and technologies becoming completely integrated into our everyday work . . . CIOS should think beyond traditional roles, questions, and audiences, and consider the opportunities to support a new breed of BI users and requirements."⁶

Find Out More Download the White Paper, "Building a Business Intelligence Competency Center" [PDF - 140KB] More about the Cognos BICC offering Cognos Performance 2006: Register Now!

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Sources

¹ Betsy Burton. Business Intelligence Competency Centers: From 'Should We?' to 'How Should We?' Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2006. Gartner. March 2006.

² ibid.

³ Betsy Burton and Mark McDonald, Smarter Use of Business Intelligence, Optimize Magazine. May 2006. Issue 22.

⁴ Cognos Expands Innovation Center Mandate to Include Business Intelligence Competency. June 26, 2006.

⁵ Cognos Accelerates Enterprise Business Intelligence Standardization with New Software Services Offerings. June 26, 2006.

⁶ Betsy Burton and Mark McDonald, Smarter Use of Business Intelligence, Optimize Magazine. May 2006. Issue 22.