[A Strategic View of BI & EPM – Part 6 of 6]
Your organization has put significant time and budget into implementing BI and EPM solutions. You are now seeing the fruits of your efforts with an improved financial planning system, more timely views of sales channel profitability, deeper analysis of supply chain performance, or more relevant visualization of key indicators for senior management. How do you best support the platforms and solutions you’ve deployed, so that you continue to derive benefit into the future as business needs and technologies evolve?
A well-trained system administrator working closely with business users and an IT organization that assures networks run and data flows are basic for keeping the lights on day to day. But as you extend your BI footprint and seek to leverage greater value across the enterprise, you might soon realize that a better coordinated and holistic approach could help. That’s where a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC), or Center of Excellence (COE), comes in.
In my experience COEs are uncommon. Where they are implemented they take different shapes and their responsibilities and goals vary, depending on the company. The COE can start as an informal group with a narrow charter, and in time evolve into a more formal organization with defined authority and some dedicated staff.
Where ever you are on the BI adoption/maturity scale below are some areas of competency and influence to bring together into an effective BI COE, whether it’s an ad hoc committee or a formal organization.
Advocacy: The COE promotes the value of BI, the tools deployed, and related practices to help drive adoption into all areas of the business. It works to get the business users and IT to better understand each other, improving the cooperation that’s key for BI and EPM success.
Technical skills: The COE maintains a fairly deep level of technical understanding of the BI and EPM technologies deployed, and assures the right skills are developed or brought in-house. It can support existing solutions, and may provide developer skills or coordinate outside resources for new solution development.
Technology evaluation: The COE builds awareness of other technologies on the market and determines if they might have a place in the enterprise; it evaluates and tests new options and recommends how to balance the enterprise’s BI technology portfolio.
Business knowledge: The COE includes a strong understanding of business analysis, reporting and planning as well as an understanding of the data required to support the processes. It works with the business departments to identify needs and the best solution approaches.
Project and portfolio management: The COE provides a consistent process for evaluating needs and requirements, and for prioritizing projects. It can provide project management and technical guidance, and measures project success and ROI.
Data governance: The COE drives the creation of common business rules, data definitions and metrics; it leads efforts to improve data quality and implement effective data governance practices.
Clearly, the COE must draw from both the IT and business sides of the organization. In order to have credibility and influence, it must be supported at the senior management level.
What are the benefits? An effective COE improves operational efficiencies of BI and EPM technologies and related processes, reduces the cost of implementation and support, and enables strategic transformation of the enterprise.
How can bringing together the right skills and experiences help your organization sustain effective BI and EPM? If you have implemented or worked with a Center of Excellence, what key benefits have you seen?
Read other articles in this series:
Part 1 : How Can BI & EPM Help You Build a Performance Edge?
Part 2 : Who Needs a BI and EPM Strategy?
Part 3 : How Can a Project & Technology Roadmap Keep Your BI & EPM Strategy On Track?
Part 4 : Why Do Data Governance and Master Data Management Matter?
Part 5 : How Can Aligning Reporting and Metrics Improve Enterprise Performance?