Ensure that members are cross-organizational -- and change members regularly. These two best practices accomplish the same goal. By definition, the BICC should be a cross-organizational group that encompasses a range of members, including business users, analysts, and technology-skilled resources. Even if the company's business intelligence and performance management efforts are focused on a specific area of the business or a focused set of business objectives, the BICC should have representation from other key areas of the organization, peripheral areas that business intelligence initiatives may affect over time, and administrative and operational functions that can help drive people and business changes. Making the BICC truly cross-organizational, and rotating members in and out regularly, helps promote the companywide use of applications and tools, educate others about the benefits of business intelligence, and support a corporate culture focused on information analysis.

Establish up front the BICC's expected focus on business, people, process, and technology issues. As the company's strategy evolves, as different users become involved with BI and performance management efforts, and as the BICC's initiatives mature, the competency center may shift focus to different aspects of support for business intelligence and performance management. Depending on the maturity of an initiative, the BICC may need to focus as much on marketing, promotion, and cultural change as it does on implementation. This focus is by no means exclusive, but organizations need to understand how the BICC's mix of tasks should develop as it supports different phases of an initiative.

For example, during the "vision" and "use" phases of the initiative, the BICC may focus more on strategy, people, processes, metrics, and readiness and adoption assessments than on technologies. During the "plan" and "build" phases, the BICC is likely to focus more on processes, architectures, choosing services and technology vendors, and technology development and integration than on the people and business strategy issues. Finally, technology and people issues may dominate the BICC's activities during the "operate" phase of an initiative as the organization supports, deploys, maintains, markets, and trains users on -- and promotes the adoption of -- business intelligence and performance management applications and tools. Exhibit 3, illustrates how a competency center might structure its areas of focus.

Build on incentives rather than punishment. Membership in and support of a BI competency center should not be enforced, but instead should be supported by management incentives in the shape of bonuses, rewards, or recognition. In many cases, supporting business intelligence and performance management requires cultural changes that are very difficult to enforce. The level of incentive should reflect the organization's commitment to and focus on business intelligence and performance management. By building the BICC on incentives, a company promotes the benefits of business intelligence within the organization and motivates more people across the organization to become involved.

Create a business-driven priority list. Many of Gartner's IT clients feel like they are stuck on a treadmill, responding only to tactical issues. To get off this treadmill, they must organize their work based on a list of projects, metrics, and people that is prioritized according to how much each affects business objectives. Most of our clients have found that a basic tier system can help them prioritize the list -- for example, a system that rates items on a scale from one to five depending on their impact on corporate strategic goals. Questions like these can help a company determine their BI priorities: What metrics have the highest impact on our business strategy and objectives? Which people/groups have the highest impact on achieving our objectives? What processes do these people need to use in order to deliver the highest impact on our business objectives? What applications and business intelligence technologies do these people need in order to deliver the highest impact on our business objectives? And what information has the highest impact on our business objectives?

When it has a defined list of priorities, the BICC can respond more positively and proactively to tactical and strategic requests from different parts of the business. Conflicts regarding priorities should be raised within the BICC for negotiation and, if needed, brought to the attention of the executive sponsor. Keep in mind that, as with all aspects of the BICC, the priority list should be updated regularly to reflect changes in business strategy and objectives over time.

Be able to lead, as well as follow. Many of the practices Gartner recommends are shaped by senior management's definition of the organization's business strategy and metrics. But many organizations find it difficult to get their management team to define them. In such cases, the BICC can become the catalyst for the organization to define its strategy. This does not mean the BICC defines the business strategy or metrics, but rather that it helps senior management and the organization as a whole realize the benefits of building a business intelligence initiative based on well-understood business strategies and metrics. The BICC and its sponsor may need to help lead these discussions and definitions, but senior managers should define the strategy once they understand the need. The competency center may also need to prod corporate leaders to revisit those objectives over time, as appropriate.

Work with other competency centers within the organization. In companies that have business application competency centers or sourcing competency centers, for example, the BICC should determine the areas and initiatives that are most relevant to its business intelligence and performance management objectives, then establish links with other competency centers based on that determination. Companies can encourage learning and even project rotation among their various competency centers and use incentives to reward collaborative behavior and encourage joint activities.

Create avenues for inputs and responses. In order to drive cultural and business change, the BICC needs to stay in touch with the larger organization, so it needs to create ways for business users, IT personnel, analysts, and managers to provide feedback about any issues they have with the organization's business intelligence and performance management efforts. Options include setting up a specific e-mail address for feedback to the BICC, engaging in informal meetings with other departments to discuss best practices, and distributing a BICC newsletter. By creating these kinds of avenues of communication, the BI competency center can head off real and perceived issues before they become problematic; learn about new business and technology opportunities; and develop (through skills, knowledge, and experience) potential future BICC members.

Promote and measure successes. BI competency centers need to gauge their impact on the organization by tracking their short- and long-term broad business impact; capturing and documenting the granular benefits they provide, such as performance improvements and process efficiencies; auditing the perceived user value of their services; and documenting what's working, along with what's not. Gartner's clients often focus their BICC tasks on program management issues relating to processes and technologies -- for example, defining requirements, getting funding, defining a data-quality strategy, selecting technologies, and planning the organization's information architecture. These tasks are clearly important, but they are just part of the role of a BICC. To continue to receive funding for initiatives, and to improve user adoption and acceptance of them, BI competency centers should devote around 85 percent (plus or minus 10 percent) of their time to work that is not technologically intensive -- for example, training users; promoting the adoption of practices, methodologies, tools, and applications; and marketing their efforts, progress, and impact via management update reports, user-oriented newsletters, and cross-organizational user groups.

The Impact a BICC Can Have on Technology Usage

Gartner's recent BI-user survey revealed that organizations which have a BI competency center are less likely to have data that is highly inconsistent or fragmented across systems and departments. Businesses that have not yet formed a BICC are more likely to have tools, applications, and data in "silos." Many organizations without a BICC are just beginning to reconcile these discrepancies across systems.

Since a BICC provides the catalyst for making both IT and business decisions, it is not surprising that organizations with a BICC are more likely to support business intelligence efforts for users who are driving business strategy. Organizations without a BICC are more apt to use data only in support of one-off tactical decisions, rather than as a key driver in the strategic decision-making process. In addition, 60 percent of respondents in companies that have a BICC indicated that a broad set of users in their organization effectively uses business intelligence to drive business strategy, compared with 30 percent of respondents in companies without a BI competency center.

Finally, organizations with an established BICC are more likely to have developed processes that address data quality and availability. Organizations with a BICC are almost twice as likely to have defined and enforced data governance policies than those without a BICC. Despite this, more than 40 percent of all organizations, whether or not they have a BI competency center, indicated that they have only limited internal controls on data, and that information is often misinterpreted or even modified to meet individual departments' needs.

Information integrity, consistency, and quality will continue to be of significant concern for most organizations for the foreseeable future. Blaming technology, and looking for technology-oriented solutions such as "universal access to information," is a flawed, knee-jerk approach to data problems. Without business user involvement, BI problems can't be solved. Successful organizations focus on developing a BI competency center in which team members have the right skills, in both business and IT. With the business focus and the commitment that a well-formed BICC can provide, a company can give end users the necessary level of access to information, achieve semantic consistency in that information, and ensure that the information is high-quality.

Bill Hostmann is a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

Previous 1 2 3