1

Business Intelligence Competency Centers Authored by: Georges H. Prouty, Teradata Sr. Industry Consultant

Abstract

Quality Business Intelligence requires a three-pronged approach comprised of (1)

people, (2) process and (3) technology. Woven into the process and technology is the

concept of integrated data. While the concept and execution of data integration and the

wise selection of technology tools and platforms is a given, many companies are still

awakening to the need of an integrated and planned approach to business intelligence

delivery. The Business Intelligence Competency Center (“BICC”) answers this call to

action by creating an organization of select individuals who share a common BI expertise

or responsibility, and provide the requisite process for BI delivery.

Introduction

While opinions vary in the business intelligence and data warehouse communities

regarding the need for data integration and centralization for the delivery of high quality

and consistent business intelligence (BI), there is a growing understanding of the need for

a centralized BICC organization to guide BI strategy and delivery across an enterprise.

As a result, companies have been implementing and formalizing BICCs at increasing

rates.

This article focuses on describing what a BICC is, its responsibilities, and the nuances of

that makes for a successful BICC.

What is a BICC?

Business intelligence is no longer an optional or accidental method for delivering critical

information and analysis to an organization; it is a vital component of a company’s

decision process, strategy and operational aptitude and responsiveness. Given the

competitive and global nature of business, along with the pressures of faster response

time and business flexibility to changing conditions, the delivery of quality business

intelligence needs to be planned, orchestrated, executed, governed, and measured.

Additionally, business intelligence efforts need to be supported within the highest levels

of an organization, encouraging the implementation and growth of a central body or

competency center1 to drive quality data warehousing and business intelligence.

A BICC answers the critical competitive, strategic and tactical information needs of an

organization by assembling and implementing a team of people who are focused and

expert on business intelligence and data warehouse delivery. It should enable innovation

on the part of the organization and the individual BI users by providing best practices and

1 A competency center approach towards specific applications, technologies or business processes have

proved themselves through time. Competency centers are not a new concept in organizations nor are they

limited to BI. Competency centers have been in existence in many organizations in a number of different

forms for a number of years. Known also as a Center of Excellence (“COE”), competency centers have

proven their ROI and advantages across a number of areas including web content management applications

and data integration.

2

leading approaches in the application of BI to solve business problems and drive value

throughout the organization. In its most basic definition, a BICC is a cross-functional, co-

located, core team of individuals that share common BI expertise and responsibilities.

To dissect the meaning of a BICC further, the key components of such an organization

are further illuminated within the name itself:

• Business Intelligence means a focus on business intelligence delivery whether it

is in the form of report, scorecards, dashboards, or analytics such as data mining

and predictive modeling. It is dependent upon, data warehousing and traditional

data warehousing tools and disciplines such as data acquisition and data model

design.

• Competency calls for a group of individuals that have both training and

demonstrated experience and certification in a particular set of tools,

development, platforms, delivery of methodologies as well as business

understanding. It is recommended that they have certifications2 to support their

practice.

• Center implies a central group of individuals who can work together as a team,

cross-train, and maintain lesson-learned documentation so that there can be

continued improvement and advancement. “Central” can have a number of

meanings further explored below such as co-located, virtually located or satellite

centric. Center also implies a central body of knowledge such as a repository for

re-usable code, solutions and lessons-learned.

Core Composition and Alignment

A BICC team should be comprised of team players who can communicate with

management and the BI community to implement a cohesive enterprise BI strategy. To

be effective within an organization, the team should be cross-functional consisting of

both business and IT professionals. Further, the team should be built with the right

expertise based on market demand and need of an organization. In a perfect world, a

BICC should be autonomous within its own independent organization. This model, as

compared to a “business owned” or “IT owned” organization, will allow the BICC

greater flexibility and effectiveness within the enterprise as well as influence. If such

independence is organizationally and financially prohibitive, the group should

organizationally fall under the business since the business intelligence needs are business

2 One of the tenants of a BICC is the development of competencies. It is based on bringing expertise

together and fostering learning and cross-training. This is particularly so as the BI and DW worlds are

constantly changing requiring members of a BICC to continually update their skills. Obtaining product or

trade certifications such as TDWI are a natural part of this training reality. Further, one of the key success

criteria of a BICC is that the users of the organization have faith in the people that comprise it. Both

product and trade certifications differentiate the BICC members from the BI user community, promoting

confidence within the enterprise. While it is true that a BICC is as good as its people--and its people are as

good as the experience and education that they bring to the table—a certification is a license to practice.

3

driven. There should also be dotted-line reporting relationships with IT to assure that IT

strategies, process, protocol and methodology are intact.

BICC Technologies, Functional Areas & Skills

Within the definition of BI, the team has expertise in a number of areas of data

warehousing and information delivery. Such expertise can include some or all of the

following traditional BI technologies, functions and skills:

• Business intelligence tools and platforms

• Analytical intelligence (data mining, predictive modeling)

• Data-centered application development

• Implementation consulting of key BI and DW technologies

• BI delivery (including reporting, scorecards and dashboards creation)

• BI delivery consulting including BI architecture

• Semantic data model design disciplines

• Semantic data access implementation

• Project management and delivery

• Process formulation and execution

• Technology support

• BI best-practices

Further, the BICC should have an in-depth knowledge of an enterprise’s data and

business.

As the BI delivery is only as good as the data warehouse, data quality and data

integration that feed it, a successful and comprehensive BICC should also have

responsibility for (directly or indirectly) or influence (through consulting and advocacy)

the following DW technologies, skills and practices as follows:

• DW delivery

• DW architecture

• Extract, transform and load (“ETL”) technologies and practice

• Logical and physical data model design disciplines

• Physical data access implementation

• DW technology support

• Master data management (“MDM”)

• Metadata management

Finally, as Business Intelligence can be no better than the quality of the data, as derived

or influenced through governing bodies, principals, policies, standards, and data quality

initiatives, a BICC should have influence (but not responsibility) over the following

areas:

• Data quality (“DQ”)

• Data governance and stewardship

4

Benefits and Purposes of a BICC

The benefits and purposes of a BICC implementation are numerous. Some of the key

benefits include:

• Best practices

• Operational efficiencies

• Data warehouse and data governance (advocacy and consulting)

• Data integration roadmap, strategies and implementation

• Budgeting strategies

• Speed to market & flexibility

• Standardization

• Risk reduction

• Education and marketing

• Return on investment (“ROI”)

• Total cost of ownership (“TCO”)

• Project delivery improvements

• Quality improvements

• Community and commonality of business and IT

• Accessibility

• Technology and application support

• Vendor management

Best Practices

Providing and standardizing best practices for BI is a critical function of a BICC. The

pursuit of BI and DW standards is a foundational pillar of any BICC. Without best

practices, the BICC itself is vulnerable to ineffectiveness, or worse, disillusion. The very

nature of a BICC is premised on the need to standardize approach, minimize risk,

encourage re-use, influence data integration, reduce duplicity in systems, and increase

ROI. Accordingly, without such a dimension, we would not have a BICC.

Operational Efficiencies

A BICC will drive better utilization of the data warehouse by leveraging BI tools,

platforms, processes, as well as people skills. It will encourage leveraged solutions at

both an enterprise and group level and common technology stacks. It will exploit the

technologies that are selected and eliminate less effective solutions. It will reduce the

propensity of companies to purchase multiple BI tools and platforms and hopefully

eliminate shelf-ware.

5

Data Warehouse and Data Governance (Advocacy and Consulting)

Although a BICC is focused on BI, it is recommended that it influence data warehouse

and data governance.

With respect to data warehouse governance, the BICC should make recommendations as

to how the data warehouse should be governed across an enterprise. These

recommendations should influence DW policy, governance structure and how future data

warehouse projects or changes will be selected and prioritized. Such standards are vital

to the continuing health and success of a warehouse.

With respect to data governance, again, the BICC should influence standards for data

ownership and stewardship with other participants. The business would have ownership

of the data and its stewardship, whereas the BICC would consult as to data best practices.

Data Integration Roadmap, Strategies, and Implementation

A BICC minimizes the number of business solutions and processes across an

organization, and maximize the effectiveness of a standard set of solutions. A BICC will

focus on data integration as a path to the effective utilization of data as a corporate asset.

It will chart a course and plan for data integration across an enterprise. Such work is vital

in improving the quality and depth of data intelligence, as well as the speed of delivery

and reduction in costs

Providing integration strategies is such a vital part of successful data warehouse and

business intelligence programs within an organization, that some organizations actually

create a separate integration strategy competency center. The integration of data and

systems is fundamental to the success of BI delivery. Bad integration (or lack thereof)

increases costs and reduces the likelihood of success.

A common death nail to successful BI is a lack of data integration. Many organizations

today are faced with disparate data marts, multiple versions of the truth, and inconsistent

and/or untimely ETL processes. This degraded state of affairs is further enhanced by

political realities within an organization’s structure causing stove pipe views of data and

redundancy in development efforts, a product versus a customer perspective, isolated

legacy systems that thwart retirement, data center stasis, and data hoarders who abhor any

concept of data democratization.

A BICC should be charged with breaking down these encumbrances and silos through (1)

vision, (2) education of the organization and (3) through promulgation of best practices

and standards.

Budgeting Strategies

One of the great difficulties facing BI and DW initiatives is the problems of navigating

budgets of multiple LOBs within an organization to accomplish enterprise strategies.

6

When there is no central budget for BI and DW initiatives, organizations have to

scrounge and negotiate for budget and establish allocation schemes between LOBs.

Many times, a BI or DW project that involves multiple LOBs is started as one of the

LOBs blinks, and agrees to absorb the costs upfront.

A BICC should work towards establishing a shared budget for its services. This budget

should likely be established by a governing committee within the organization. This will

keep the BICC focused on strategy, rather than be hobbled by a companies budgeting

limitations.

Speed to Market & Flexibility

The practices, techniques, tools and disciplines employed by the BICC will improve

solution time to market and work to support business intelligence-driven value within the

organization. Additionally, a BICC will allow for greater flexibility towards solutions

based on business need.

No time in history has the business world been so fast-paced and competitive. As a

necessity, business needs to be nimble, flexible, and responsive to the demands it is

facing. A key reason for business intelligence is to answer the strategic and tactical needs

of the business world. The BICC can assist in this need through:

o Reusing solutions

o Depth of data knowledge

o Facilitating and encouraging collaboration between the business and IT

o Maturity and experience of staff dedicated to business intelligence and

data warehousing

o Shared vision

o Commitment of BICC to education and certification of its staff and BI

users.

o Centralization and/or integration of data

o Sandbox environments of BI and DW tools and platforms that allow

prototyping and iterative or radical development methodologies

Standardization

A BICC will identify and implement best practices across an enterprise as well as select

appropriate BI technology to reduce complexity and hold-back or reduce costs. Cost

reduction will be seen in the areas of full time employees (FTEs) assigned to BI roles

including support and product maintenance.

Risk Reduction

Risk will be reduced through the effective use of information sharing, re-use libraries,

best practices, standardization, and learning through knowledge management supporting

capture and reuse of lessons-learned.

7

Education and Marketing

This is one of the key responsibilities of a BICC. While marketing and education is

usually not stated in the same breath, they are closely related and utterly inseparable for a

BICC.

A pivotal goal of a BICC is to provide education to BI users and management which

encourages best practices and BI maturity within the organization. The enterprise will be

more productive as well as informed through the education and training efforts of a

BICC. Such benefits will include:

• Quicker maturity of a BICC due to co-location, shared expertise and cross

training.

• Faster acceptance and effective use by BI users due to a BICC’s training

programs that are tailored to the company’s needs

• Accessibility of in-house training

• Better overall maturity of an organization and acceptance and need of analytics

and active data warehousing

• Better sharing of BI and DW solutions across businesses and between IT and the

business.

• Better understanding of the value of BI and DW.

A BICC’s charter is to educate the business users of BI best practices on what tools and

platforms exist and the solutions they can offer, on cutting edge technologies, on maturity

of BI practices, on how to use and develop on BI tools and ultimately on the importance

of all of these and the BICC. In essence, they are the in-house champion of BI. A BICC

will communicate on any of these levels, in a number of different ways:

• Training Classes. A BICC will work with the vendor to set-up training classes

for both business users and IT developers. In many cases, the BICC will

conduct the training itself, customized to an enterprise.

• User Groups. A BICC should set-up and facilitate regularly scheduled user

group meetings wherein both business and IT users can exchange wins, lessons-

learned, and techniques on specific technologies or vendor products. This is

also the correct forum for where the BICC can keep everyone up-to-date on new

developments within a set of products and/or within the user community and

enterprise. The user groups can be organized around specific products or

around subject areas. Either way, this is critical education and marketing to

support the BICC efforts as well as successful practices across the enterprise.

• Lunch and Learns. User groups tend to be held less frequently while lunch and

learns can be held based on need. These sessions tend to focus specifically on

products or techniques that a sub-set of the BI community needs.

• BI Annual Conference. Another excellent marketing event that can be focused

more on Senior Management is the use of an annual internal BI conference.

Typically, such sessions celebrate wins over the past year and discuss needs and

approaches to the coming year. A good practice is to include talks by Sr.

Management, users, and vendors both already in place or proposed.

8

Return on Investment (“ROI”)

A decision to purchase business intelligence or data warehousing tools and platforms

should not come lightly. The capital investment involved in the purchase of business

intelligence and data warehousing solutions can be significant, as well as the associated

costs of professional services, staffing, training, infrastructure costs, and maintenance.

There are also the costs that can be calculated and incurred from failed projects, missed

delivery dates, application down-time, tactical and strategic decisions based on faulty

data, duplication of systems and development work, duplication of code due to a lack of

reusability, duplication of errors due to the reuse of bad code or design, and many other

reasons.

A BICC can eliminate and/or reduce the potential losses and costs that can occur in many

BI or DW implementations. Further, a positive ROI can be easily demonstrated when

policies, procedures, and best practices are implemented by a BICC. One can quickly see

how some of the costs in the above paragraph can quickly add-up, especially as the

propensity of a business intelligence or data warehouse solution will grow in scale

overtime, multiplying the costs.

Further, a BICC will be able to implement solutions that have been carefully crafted from

the business needs through cross-functional team collaboration and consulting, best

practices and standardization. Over time, solutions will have a faster time to market as

the BICC matures, making the business more flexible to changing business and market

conditions.

It is important to mention, however, that the creation of a BICC does not come without a

price tag. There is an initial investment that a company will need to make in staff and

training as well as other hard and soft costs.3 Even when figuring in this outlay in a ROI

calculation, the BICC will still demonstrate a positive return on investment as long as the

BICC is effective within the organization. The BICC management will be responsible to

demonstrate these savings to senior management.

Total Cost of Ownership (“TCO”)

For many of the same reasons in the ROI section above, the total cost of ownership of

business intelligence and data warehouse tools and platforms decrease overtime because

of a BICC for many of the following reasons:

• Reduction in duplicative coding through the use of reusable solutions.

3 Staffing costs can be significant upfront. It will not always be possible to “re-deploy” staff in traditional

IT roles that are trained solely in developing and implementing transaction systems. Many times, the

creation of a BICC will require outside hiring and recruitment so that the right level of BI.DW skills and

experience are utilized. A BICC will only be as good as its people and those people will need to

differentiate themselves from traditional IT delivery.

9

• Centralized license management and pooling, reducing unnecessary purchases

and eliminating unneeded maintenance. The BICC’s oversight of licensing

ensures that the right licensing will be given to the user based on ability and

needs.

• Reduction in the number of people to deliver project implementations

• Reduction in vendor training where the BICC can provide alternative training

• Reduction in the number of FTEs to support implementations due to best

practices, centralized alignment with vendor support, and the reduction of help

desk issues

• Reduction in the number of independent data mart implementations.

• Reduction in infrastructure complexity

• Savings and profit arising out of strategic and tactical decisions on sound data

Project Delivery Improvements

The BICC promises substantial project delivery advantages because of commonality to

approach, a customized development life cycle for BI and DW, higher quality

requirements and testing due to a business and IT collaborative approach, and access to

lessons learned repositories for the mitigation of future project risk. The benefits can be

demonstrated in:

o A greater likelihood of success

o Faster time to market

o Reduction in project risk

o Containment of unnecessary changes due to better requirements

o Better consistency with estimates

o More robust solutions because of team co-development

Therefore, an important staffing consideration for a BICC is the employment of

experienced BI and DW project managers. This is an important consideration as business

intelligence and data warehousing project management is a specialty within the field of

project management.

Quality Improvements

It follows that the BICC would deliver higher quality solutions because of the team’s

experience, training, access to lessons learned and reuse repositories and business and IT

collaboration. Quality is further assured by the BICC for the following additional

reasons:

o Shared data vision

o Cohesive strategy

o Design standards

o Packaged approach

o Architecture strategy

o Structure for consistent answers

o Consistent testing practices

o Data governance standards and implementation

10

o Data warehouse governance standards and implementation

o Data integration efforts

o Data quality efforts

Community and Commonality of Business and IT

A BICC, if successful, can turn a disparate organization with multiple lines of business,

political outposts, and a dysfunctional IT and Business relationship into a community of

BI users focused on common solutions to business problems. Community is important as

a unified group will better embrace and advance some of the key goals of a BICC such as

data integration, reusability, and elimination of redundancy. Granted, this is hard to

achieve and will take persistence and drive to overcome organizational obstacles, but a

BICC has some valuable approaches it can use to move an organization in this direction.

They include:

o Marketing value through successful projects and implementations

o Demonstrating improved ROI and TCO

o Launching of internal user groups

o Lunch and learn events

o Successful training demonstrated in quality utilization of tools and

platforms

o Demonstration of senior management support through internal BI events.

There is no other place in the business world requiring a greater joining of forces of IT

and the business as there is in data warehousing and business intelligence. With

traditional OLTP (online transaction processing) delivery, the business is only

sufficiently involved with the requirements, testing, change management and sign-off

phases of an application. There is little to no involvement by the business after an

application has been placed into production, unless issues arise or in the planning of the

next releases. With data warehousing and business intelligence, the business and IT need

to be tied at the hip not only for the duration of a project delivery, but continually through

the life of a data warehouse or BI implementation. Data, and the changing and

competitive business environment that it is used in, are two key reasons demanding a

unique business and IT relationship.

Data

Data used by BI is paramount and long-lived; it is vital in making decisions that could

have long term impact on a company. According, the data needs to be accurate,

integrated, understood, refined, accessible, and available so that business questions can

be answered, business opportunities addressed, regulatory bodies responded to, and

strategies accomplished.

Traditionally, the business of IT is to provide systems that support or access the data

while the business understands the data at an atomic level and is able to harvest it for

value. Since an optimal BICC is a mixture of business and IT members and specialties,

11

the diverse needs and value of data are addressed. Within a BICC organization, the

business members can articulate the business user needs to the IT members for the

delivery of a solution.

Changing Business Needs

Today, there is a greater urgency to make strategic and tactical decisions to stay

competitive. Solutions need to be nimble and change is a certainty. The information used

to make business decisions needs to be precise and highly available, the data needs to be

of a high quality, complete and integrated, the data model needs to be flexible to allow

for changes and additional data, and the delivery mechanism needs to be flexible and

competent. Based on this, there is a very high standard that needs to be upheld,

answerable only through a strong and consistent collaboration between the business and

IT.

Accessibility

Accessibility is an important win for an organization and is an integral principal of a

BICC. A BICC can influence or facilitate accessibility of data and BI solutions through:

o Centralized assistance and support

o Centralized project, product and best practices information

o Delivery of self-service capability

o Education

Selection of Technology Tools and Platforms

Without a unified approach to spending for data warehousing and business intelligence

tools and platforms, an enterprise can quickly become smitten with a number of products

and solutions, increasing ownership costs and complicating delivery of solutions. In fact,

many companies today have an assortment of half used, improperly used, or un-used

(shelf ware) BI and DW/data mart/appliance solutions. A BICC can provide guidance or

set standards on the BI and DW/data mart/appliance purchases that a company can make,

eliminating or reducing wasteful spending, enhancing the integration of systems, and

speeding delivery to the business.

A BICC can and should also make recommendations for technology stacks that are tuned

and optimized for a particular BI tool or platform. Many times little thought is given to

how a BI application should be deployed. The BICC should be charged with working

with the BI vendor as well as those responsible for a company’s infrastructure and

middleware, to arrive at recommended architecture or stacks for a BI application. This

will save time and money, as well as reduce risk.

Finally, a BICC can assist with the selection of the right tools, platforms and architecture

for the right job, improving, performance, efficiency and speeds time to market for new

functionality

12

Technology and Application Support

While much of a BICC is relegated to consulting, project execution, and providing best

practices, a portion of a BICC should have responsibility for technology and application

support. Such support may be across all levels of support or it may just handle Level 3 or

critical support requests. This will depend on the funding and make-up of the BICC. As

a base strategy, however, a BICC will have a vested interest in seeing the BI application

selections be successful in an organization, and therefore will want to work with the

vendor to resolve critical or level 3 support requests as well as influence fixes and

enhancements in future releases.

Vendor Oversight

One of the difficulties for a company, as well as it BI vendors, is having multiple contact

points across an enterprise. A typical scenario for many companies is that one BI vendor

will receive multiple requests for purchasing, technical support and product information

across multiple areas of an organization. This is problematic at best, as there are no

economies of scale or consistent messaging between a company and vendor.

A BICC should be the focal point for the vendor relationship for a number of reasons:

• Re-use of support solutions to common problems increasing economies of scale

• One voice to the vendor for consistent messaging

• Potential reduction in duplicative purchasing

• License management

• Shared responsibility with IT and the contracting organization for vendor and

product selection

The BICC should be focused on each of these areas out of the starting gate—all are

fundamental to a BICC’s success.

A BICC’s Core Competencies

As is the case with a BICC’s core purposes, there are numerous BICC core competencies

that need to be considered as part of a BICC:

• Business intelligence consulting

• Data warehousing consulting

• Master data management

• Metadata management

• Project delivery

• Data quality

• ETL

The BICC should be focused on each of these areas although, not necessarily out of the

gate. Competencies can be added as a BICC matures. These specific dimensions are

addressed further as follows:

13

Business Intelligence Consulting

There a number of reasons why there should be a strong and influential BI consulting arm

to a BICC. First, business intelligence needs are constantly changing: there is a constant

need for further and frequent business intelligence enhancements and new deployments

to meet new business challenges. A collaborative and iterative approach needs to be

available to the client to successfully meet these challenges. Second, BI solutions to these

challenges are not always clear. It is difficult for the business or IT alone to be able to

formulate requirements that are responsive as well as strategic. Thirdly, the solution

needs to be cross-functional. This is fundamental to good BI as the approach towards

robust BI is cross-functional between the business and IT. Such collaboration creates

better planned and more robust solutions and strategies. It can never be just a business or

an IT solution. A consultative approach is the right approach to meet this challenge and

will achieve better value and ROI for an organization.

Contrast this with a typical application group that will generally work with business

requirements created by a business with little or no input by the IT application

development group. While this is typical and workable for many typical types of

application development projects, this type of scenario simply will not work well for BI.

It is important to note that in some BICC operations, BICCs are run like an internal BI

consulting group, actually vying for engagements across the enterprise, and competing

against external vendors. This is an extreme case of the consulting model and a more

viable solution for companies is to allow a cross-functional consulting approach to

prevail in the development of solutions to meet business needs through mandate. In fact,

as the approach can be much different than a typical software development life-cycle

(“SDLC”) a custom development life cycle for BI should be established by the BICC or

an enterprise PMO.

Data Warehousing Consulting

Data warehousing consulting is another foundational practice of a BICC. It is part-and-

parcel of business intelligence and cannot, and should not, be separated out into its own

competency group. Because BI and DW are so connected and inter-related, it is very

difficult to address each of them separately.

Consulting for data warehousing is important for a number of reasons as follows:

• Significant business need analysis needs to be completed. A consulting approach

will determine need through interviews and make recommendations as to

solutions based on need.

• Data warehouses need to be planned in design and architecture. Data warehouses

need to be flexible in their design to accommodate future business needs.

Business and IT need to work in a collaborative manner to achieve this flexibility.

• Data warehousing projects are a process, not an end-to-themselves. There is a

need for continual collaboration, planning, design and execution (both logically

and physically) to meet the maturing needs of a warehouse environment. Again,

14

consulting is the best method to draw out the best results from both IT and the

business.

Dimensions for data warehousing consulting to both IT and the business can include, but

not be limited to:

• Architecture

• Data Integration

• Data Modeling

• Enterprise and active data warehousing

• Extract, Transport and Load (“ETL”)

• Security and access

• Query Management

• Backup

• Failover

• Tuning

• Load Management

• SLAs

Master Data Management

One of the practice areas of a BICC should be MDM. MDM is not only an emerging

technology that is at the forefront of many CIO and CEOs agendas, it is a recommended

practice for producing solid business intelligence.

A MDM practice is called for as MDM involves more than just technology

considerations. Inherent in MDM are the concepts of data integration data governance,

two key components of BI best practices.

Metadata Management

Metadata management is a key BI best practice requiring a BICC competency as soon as

the BICC is able to offer it. Many BI implementations are unable to succeed because

metadata solutions and procedures are not established, standardized or implemented

across an organization. This makes it difficult for the users to get the highest level of

benefit from its BI solutions and data warehouse and its lack breeds discontent across the

BI user community.

Project Delivery

As is the case with many aspects of business intelligence and data warehousing, project

management skills are unique, requiring project management specialization.

Consideration should be given to formulating a special SDLC for BI and DW project

delivery. Additionally, a BICC should employ project managers who are skilled in BI

and DW delivery to reduce project risk and increase the likelihood of success.

15

Data Quality

One of the key reasons that users loose confidence in a business intelligence solution is

that the quality of the data is suspect. For this reason, a BICC needs to add a data quality

competency to its repertoire. Data quality strategies, tools and methodologies are now

mainstream: the tools should be a requirement (or at least a strong consideration) for any

quality DW or BI solution. It makes good sense for a BICC to address this important

aspect of BI and DW delivery for any project engagement, and as well, for it to advocate

data quality for the enterprise.

ETL

ETL is a foundational BI competency that should not be taken lightly. A major amount

of the time and cost of any BI or DW delivery is in the ETL portion of a project.

Accordingly, ETL can benefit from solid standards in its execution, and through the

deployment of a re-use library. Typically, however, many organizations allow multiple

areas in the organization to have ETL developers providing solutions in isolation. This is

particularly true in organizations that have multiple data mart solutions, or where there

are data, organizational or political silos. A good BICC will identify this problem

quickly, and encourage standards and user groups to foster practices that are less costly.

Are all BICCs Created Equal?

BICCs are not created equally. There is no definitive structure of a BICC, and its success

and design will ultimately depend on the organization that it is serving. Some of the

forms that a BICC could take (some better than others) include:

• Centralized organization and/or shared services

• Decentralized BICCs

• Mandated or optional use

• Pure consulting or owns it all

Centralized Organization and/or Shared Services

A centralized approach is the most advantageous for a BICC and the company that

supports it. For true economies of scale, a BICC should provide guidance, support and

standards for an entire organization. Such an approach will encourage clear business

intelligence and data warehouse success criteria such as data integration, governance,

data stewardship, reusability, and cost containment.

A shared services model is a good example of a successful centralized mode for a BICC.

In such a model, the benefits and the costs of the BICC are shared across the various

business units within an enterprise. Data and governance standards are more easily

adopted and implemented and strategic purchasing of BI platforms and tools are not

duplicated.

16

Politically, and in a perfect world, such an organization should not be owned either by

singularly by IT or the business. There should either be a joint ownership or a separate

corporate area that is created. Admittedly, feasibility for either option will be difficult.

Decentralized Organizations

A decentralized BICC is a typical response in a decentralized organization where the

strategic lines of business (“LOBs) call the shots for their own respective IT solutions,

and where resources are owned by the LOB. This is not optimal, as many of the

advantages of a centralized solution are lost. Although the structure may provide benefit

to the business in creating a more customized BI structure, the economies of scale are lost

as the enterprise as a whole will tend to have duplicative systems and support structures.

Worse, the data models will be independent, and the data will not be integrated.

Transformation of data to feed the corporate entities, (e.g., general ledger, HR, legal, etc)

will be costly and more prone to error. The concept of data governance would be highly

watered-down. If any central or corporate team exists4 its influence will likely be

minimal.

Mandated or Optional Use

For best results, a BICC needs to have authority in an organization. For a decentralized

organization where the word enterprise has become a naughty word, a BICC will not

have central authority over an enterprise.

The rule of thumb for the optional use of such a BICC is influence. Sometimes an

influencing party can have a great impact on an organization’s BI and DW decisions and

solutions. To be effective at influencing, however, the BICC should have:

• High quality and certified staff that garners the respect of the LOBs

• Political influence

• Consultative model (you will likely not be able to provide any other services such

as project management, etc.)

• Successful output demonstrating value

• Metrics demonstrating value

• Great ideas

Most importantly, this type of organization has to be ahead of the curve. It needs to have

vision and strategy, investing its energies on the direction where it should influence an

organization to drive to. It should already have know-how before the enterprise demands

a new technology or approach.

4 Some organizations have a satellite model for a BICC, where each LOB has its own BICC but there is a

Corporate or Shared Services BICC that acts as a conduit to the satellite BICCs. The use of the corporate

BICC is many times optional.

17

Pure Consulting or Consulting and Ownership

Another model decision is whether a BICC should own the data warehouse and business

intelligence stack. Obviously, this will depend on how a company is organized. In a

centralized model, it is unlikely that there would be a plausible group to hand over the

ownership of the BI or DW solutions to; in a decentralized scenario, there will likely be

more pressure by the LOBs to own their platforms and environments and for a shared

BICC to provide consulting only. It is just as plausible, however, for the shared BICC to

own the environment, tools, and platform. This is obviously the better option, as it will

foster data integration, reuse and the many other key benefits of a centralized BICC.

What Makes a BICC Successful?

Regardless of the organizational form of a BICC in an organization and the pros and cons

of each, there are specific aspects of a BICC that will encourage its success. These

aspects are as follows:

• Support by CxOs

• Centralized organization and/or shared services supportive

• Experience and talent

• Inclusion and bridging of business and IT

• Centralization of the team

• Cross training

• Sandbox environment

• Lessons learned repository

• Metrics supporting success

• Internal marketing

These specifics are addressed more fully below.

Support by CxOs

A critical component of a BICC is executive sponsorship within an organization. A

BICC imposes a different operational model on an organization—a model that

encourages centralization of BI efforts for the enterprise as well as a cross-functional (the

business and IT) approach towards BI. The model also establishes authority for

implementing a centralized process/standards making body that amongst other things,

may impose dashboard standards, and control over ad hoc queries, or influence data

models, data and data warehouse governance. Given the political nature of such a

structure and the reality of its standards promulgation or influence, BICCs will have

difficulty succeeding and becoming influential within an organization if they are created

organically.

Experience and Talent

Any BICC that is worth its salt will employ very talented and experienced individuals. A

BICC will only be as good as its people so a BICC requires investment in people and

skills. The individuals should be able to provide consulting on any of the technologies,

18

products or business needs that is germane to the organization. The individuals should be

respected by non BICC members across the enterprise. They should be able to support

the products that they have endorsed, as well as the projects that they have implemented.

The individuals should be team spirited, focusing on the customers needs. They should

be willing to be cross-trained within the group, and learn from the other team members.

They should not stubbornly hang-on to traditional IT practices involving transactional

systems.

Inclusion of Business and IT

Although a BICC could be workable without cross-functional membership of IT and the

business, it will ultimately be limited in its ability to influence one side or the other and

will be less effective in its solutions. Business intelligence and data warehousing, by their

very nature, is a two sided coin. Whereas many IT areas of responsibility require little

long-term involvement with the business, business intelligence requires constant data and

solution modifications, solutions as well as stewardship. This is especially true when

considering a BI maturity model—while traditional reporting is created, batched and

maintained, analytics such as data mining require constant collaboration and immediacy

between IT and the business.

Cross Training

One of the great benefits of a BICC is the creation of a team of professionals who have

access to each others’ knowledge. This presents excellent opportunities to the team for

cross-training, allowing individuals on the team to grow and take on new challenges, and

maturing the BICC.

Sandbox Environment

A highly recommended aspect of any BICC is to implement a product sandbox that

allows BI users in the organization to (1) contrast and compare BI/DW products when

considering solutions to a business problem, (2) create prototypes of business solutions,

and (3) foster BU user training.

A sandbox is essentially a test or development environment, separate and apart from

production or the BI stack as a whole. A sandbox will typically contain test or lab level

licenses of products that are endorsed or standardized by the BICC. Such products could

include BI tools as well as ETL, MDM, DW, DQ and custom applications. Experience in

organizations with sandboxes has shown that not only is the sandbox a great attractor to

the BICC as well as a collaborative tool, but that the prototyping in the sandbox allows

for better, faster and more successful BI solutions.

Lessons Learned and Re-Use Repositories

This is a key benefit of a BICC. A BICC that is providing services, consulting, and

product services across the enterprise will quickly build experience that can be placed in

a repository of lessons learned and best practices as well as code snippets that can be

stored in a re-use library. A well developed repository will speed solution time and

reduce risk. A centralized BICC would provide the biggest benefit as it assumes a

19

consistency of BI and DW architecture and tuning. In a de-centralized model, the

number of variables, lessons learned and coded solutions will grow in proportion to the

variability of the infrastructure. In such a case, a single repository will be less likely and

the ROI would be reduced.

Metrics Supporting Success

As every organization is dynamic, and its approach to organization and solutions can

change over time, it is critical that the BICC maintain its own set of metrics to

demonstrate ROI and worth to the organization. A BICC should be operated as a

business that needs to prove its worth and provide intelligence about its efforts. An

internal dashboard that is made available to the BI users and Sr. Management should be

deployed by the BICC to track its successes and financial benefits to the organization.

Internal Marketing & Training

Internal marketing goes hand-in-hand with metrics supporting the success of the BICC.

The BICC team should include individuals that can communicate to all levels of an

organization, continually re-marketing the benefits of the BICC. This is vital as there

will be a lot of pressure brought to bear on the organization as a whole to try new

products and processes that espouse greater benefit than what is already being provided

to the organization. This is why, as well, that a continual education program should go

along with the marketing efforts. Well educated and BI users will tend to support the

solutions of the BICC.

Some of the techniques employed by BICC in this area include the following:

• User Groups.

• Lunch and Learn Sessions

Getting Started

To get started, the key is garnering support for a BICC across the organization. For many

organizations, the time to start and garner support is simply a matter of timing and DW

and BI maturity. Unfortunately as well, the right amount of pain that an organization is

feeling relative to their DW and BI solutions can also foster success in starting a BICC.

A typical starting place for many BICCs is obtaining a champion in a Sr. Management

level position within the organization. It is hard if not impossible to get a BICC off the

ground, with success and longevity, based on a grass-roots effort. From an organizational

standpoint, the BICC will meet less resistance politically, if the champion is from the

business, rather than IT. Many times, however, it is IT that plants the seeds for a BICC

with the business champion.

The last key point is to start small, and build upon your successes. It probably does not

need to be said, but a BICC’s credibility will be built on successes and not failures. If a

20

BICC takes on to many dimensions of responsibility early on, they will become

unfocused and will likely falter. The BICC should first focus on resolving a key BI

business issue, and build a plan to address that and similar issues.

Immediate focuses of a BICC should be on data quality, stewardship and governance if

an organization is not strong in those areas. These will always be political issues as well

as technological issues. The political aspects should be the first focus, as important

political issues such as data stewardship and data “ownership” can be some of the most

difficult challenges a BICC will face. A BICC will have difficulty if it simply starts

focusing on technology out of the gate.

It is important as well for a BICC to demonstrate wins in its first year or operation. Such

wins will support the BICC’s existence and feed positive metrics about a BICC’s worth

to an organization.

Summary

The creation and implementation of a BICC is an absolute necessity in today’s

challenging and competitive business world. As business now has global breadth,

competition has escalated, and the need for an organization to be more nimble and

flexible as to the business course is an absolute requirement. Not only do business

decisions need to be made quickly—not only do they need to be based on reliable as well

as predictive information—companies need the flexibility to adjust their direction based

on changing conditions and information. They can no longer afford to hold onto

decisions that worked in the past or base decisions merely on gut feel.

Further, promulgation of even more stringent and invasive regulations on various

industries is demanding that business focus on data compliance and data transparency.

Examples of such regulations include Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II.

Now, more than anytime in the past, data plays a key role in business organizations. Data

can no longer be left to chance, and business intelligence and data warehouse decisions

and practices need to be carefully choreographed by a strong organization comprised of

IT and the business, with specific and proven data warehousing, business intelligence,

and analytical intelligence skills.

A BICC brings together the business and IT into a combined organization dedicated to

the delivery of accurate, complete and timely intelligence to be used in a variety of

business and analytical applications. To be successful, the BICC:

• Must be supported if not mandated by all levels in the organization

• Include co-located business and IT experts and consultants in DW and BI

• Have influence over data and data warehouse governance and data stewardship

• Have competencies in BI, DW, ETL, integration strategies, metadata, MDM, data

quality, project management

21

• Have responsibility for, or be able to strongly influence selection of, DW and BI

solutions and applications

• Have strong communication and consulting skills

• Provide consistent and frequent education to the organization on best practices,

technologies and successes

• Provide strong marketing on the value of the practice to the organization

• Create and utilize re-use strategies

• Promulgate and distribute best practices. Monitor implementation.

• Measure success of the BICC and demonstrate value

Of key importance, the hardest challenge that a BICC will likely face is political, not

technical. Strong political support from Sr. Management is critical to a BICC’s success.

Strong marketing skills and metrics that demonstrate BICC value or ROI are all

necessary for survivability over the long haul. Finally, a BICC’s credibility will be based

on its successes. A BICC should carefully plan out what it addresses, and grow

incrementally based on its successes.