BI Competency Centers: Bringing Intelligence To the Business
Business managers today are frequently overwhelmed by a plethora of irrelevant data and content. Their company might use business intelligence (BI) and performance management systems to gather data, yet it fails to provide them with timely access to the relevant, reliable information that they need to make day-to-day decisions. Because they lack confidence in the data that's available to them, or because the information they need is too difficult to find, managers are often unable to actually use the information in their organization's BI and performance management systems to make better decisions and improve the performance of their business.
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Access white papers, product demos, and presentations from companies whose reputations have been built on helping BPM practitioners get the most from initiatives.
- BPM 101: Selecting a Business Performance Management Vendor" -- new white paper from BPM Partners
- "The Finance Challenge of Aligning the Business With Strategic Goals," a podcast featuring Palladium Group's Phillip Peck
- Ventana Research white paper "Decision-Making and Performance: Improving Essential Business Analytics and Technologies"
- “XBRL at a Glance,” white paper from XBRL US
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In frustration, many point to the company's information management infrastructure and applications as being the primary (if not the only) problem. But the root problem is not an IT issue at all. Gaining more timely access to data and improving the consistency and overall quality of available information are challenges that rely, first and foremost, on business managers.
How Mature Is Your BI?
A successful BI initiative requires business users to commit to some hard work up front to come to agreement on definitions of terminology, metrics, and acceptable data-quality levels. It requires a project team that is both business- and IT-oriented, and that is dedicated to working through any semantics issues, measuring data-quality levels, and building consensus about what's good enough and what isn't. But widespread commitment to a business intelligence or performance management initiative is difficult to come by without C-level support. Project teams without the right executive sponsor may jump right into an evaluation of technologies, skipping the business-oriented prep work that is so crucial to success.
A recent Gartner survey of more than 350 BI end users indicates that many companies are setting up their business intelligence and performance management initiatives for failure. Only 10 percent of respondents' BI and performance management efforts are sponsored by a C-level executive with a direct link to the business. The largest number of respondents (40 percent) stated that initiatives are sponsored by business managers with narrower responsibility; 25 percent said they are sponsored by an IT manager; and 25 percent indicated that their BI projects have no executive sponsor. Not surprisingly, our survey results also point to a general disconnect within many organizations between the strategic vision of senior management and the company's tactics for supporting business intelligence and information management. For organizations in this situation, a systematic approach to making future business intelligence and performance management technology investments -- and to maximizing the value derived from the systems that are already in place -- can be invaluable.
A crucial first step in developing a systematic approach to investing in BI and performance management projects is to evaluate where senior management would like the company to sit on Gartner's business intelligence maturity curve (shown in exhibit 1). What level of BI technology maturity would best support the business's goals and objectives? In our recent survey, we found that 89 percent of organizations are at either the tactical or focused level of maturity; 30 percent registered at level two on our maturity curve, and 59 percent landed in level three. We determined that 7 percent of organizations have reached level four (strategic use of BI/performance management technologies) and no organizations have achieved level five (pervasive use). A different Gartner survey which polled CIOs found that business intelligence is a top technology initiative within IT management circles. But in the more recent survey of BI end users, 3.1 percent said their organization is still at level one on our maturity curve -- that is to say, it is unaware of the potential benefits of business intelligence and continues to use only spreadsheets to gather and disseminate vital performance information.
When managers evaluate their organization's position on Gartner's BI and performance management maturity curve, they need to keep in mind that for some businesses becoming strategic and/or pervasive in their use of business intelligence is not worth the effort. Some companies need only to be able to support focused business intelligence and performance management initiatives within discrete niches of the organization. Other businesses, however -- because of organizational strategy and the goals laid out by senior management -- should seek ways to make business intelligence and performance management more strategic and pervasive across the whole organization.
Companies that are at a lower level on the maturity curve than they'd like to be should strive to understand the challenges they would have to overcome to move up the curve. In many cases, the BI maturity within organizations varies by process and/or department; most organizations find that each major process area has its own maturity level and its own obstacles to overcome in increasing its BI/performance management maturity. After identifying its (perhaps varied) obstacles to maturity in its use of BI and performance management technologies, a company needs to figure out how to overcome those barriers. We've found that its best bet in becoming mature in these disciplines companywide is to develop a business intelligence competency center (BICC).
