INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Planning and implementing a BI competency center

October 18, 2006

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from "BI Competency Centers: A Pragmatic Approach to BI Standardization," by Michael Dziekan, which originally appeared in the September issue of Cognos SupportLink. Michael Dziekan is Cognos Global Program Director, BICC.

Establishing a successful business intelligence competency center, or BICC, depends on the right planning and implementation. Organizations that take a measured, well-managed approach are more likely to succeed. Those that do will gain wider support, contribute significant cost savings to the corporate balance sheet, and help take business intelligence to the next strategic level.

An important first step is to review the perception of the BICC within your organization the maturity level of the effort. Asking these questions can help:

Is a BICC a new concept to the organization?
Do you have a BICC already in place and want to improve it?
Is your BICC effective but you want to expand the offering?

Building your vision and strategy

Building the vision and strategy for your BICC starts with a clear understanding the BICC concept and determining where and how it could be implemented in your organization. It's also important to understand its goals, objectives, and measures of success. Again, ask yourself these key questions:

What is the role you intend of the BICC?
Who would be involved with the BICC?
Should its structure be centralized or decentralized?
What funding options are available?
Is our culture attuned to a competency center philosophy?

Cognos Professional Services can help get you on track

Cognos recently announced a new Global Customer Service initiative that supports your journey toward BICCs and eventual BI standardization. The announcement highlighted services that support the foundations of our BICC offerings also and introduced you to our Migration and Conversion initiatives.

Cognos provides you with a series of supporting "BICC Primer" documents. These include both an overview presentation of the BICC philosophy, fact sheets about the basic BICC principles, and a series of ongoing case study and research developments. These can help you socialize the concept and are readily available through the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management™.

Business Intelligence Competency Centers
The Cognos BICC Service helps you establish and enforce BI standards.

The available Cognos BICC Discovery Workshop helps you take the next step to build your BICC vision and strategy by clearly understanding the BICC concept and determining where and how it could be implemented, as well as understanding its primary goals, objectives and measures of success.

Our BICC Discovery Workshop will help you prepare for the BICC journey – to successfully establish and sustain a BI culture that will allow BI to permeate your entire organization and embrace information as a means to enable better decisions.

A broad array of consulting and partner capabilities are at your disposal to help you develop and implement your BICC effort. For example: our Application Service, Review Service, Client Management, and Installation Service help you establish a central infrastructure that drives repeatable, sustainable use and adoption of BI.

Build a path to BI standardization

The BICC will help you become self-sufficient in deploying, using, and managing Cognos technologies throughout your entire organization, for ubiquitous, pervasive business intelligence.

Standardizing on a single BI solution built around IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence will provide you with invaluable benefits including:

Business productivity gains.
Spend time developing action plans instead of disputing the figures.
Spend less time learning disparate tools.
Streamlined spending and reduced overall cost of ownership.
Command a more strategic relationship.
Spend less time evaluating BI vendors project by project.
Reduce the number of servers deployed, reduce maintenance efforts, training costs, and implement solid best practices to accelerate deployment.
Increased access to timely, relevant, and more consistent data.

"Standardization on IBM 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," says Simon Gratton, Director of Business Intelligence at TELUS.

Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology central to BICCs

The most successful business intelligence initiatives are deployed through a pragmatic development effort that matures over time. Based on our experiences in assisting other customers, we recommend that you (1) start small; (2) think strategically, and (3) systemically accelerate. Whether you are designing a BICC or engaged in a conversion or migration effort to drive standardization throughout the organization, these efforts require their own level of guidance, skills and management.

Cognos has developed a repeatable methodology that can assist its customers in implementing Cognos solutions. This methodology, called the Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology, or SIM, follows the standard implementation phases – Analyze, Design, Build, Deploy, and Operate – and is supported by a project management layer. The Cognos SIM is your step-by-step guide to conducting a complete Cognos implementation. It contains structured steps, proven practices, tools, role definitions, and tip and techniques.

Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology
The Cognos SIM is based on industry-standard proven practices.

Because configuration and deployment procedures vary according to product line, particularly in the design and build phases, Cognos has developed different implementation roadmaps. The implementation roadmaps guide you through procedures to address the varying tasks, activities, and user needs. The Cognos Professional Services efforts to develop pragmatic prescriptive implementation roadmaps for designing a BICC, conversion, and migration follow this same well-established approach.