Mark Flaherty (MF): Now it’s also important to understand what the BICC is made up of. This is not just an IT group. From a terminology perspective I distinguish between BICC and a COE or center of excellence by the focus as far as the expansion. COE could be an IT organization that is a center of excellence that runs a shared service that different lines of business will access in order to get their reports or to get their information or to run their applications.
When I talk about BICC, it’s more of an infrastructure from an organization and skills perspective. So you have the IT skills that they understand the administration, the security, the governance of data, and they also manage the tools and the systems. But you also need analytical skills from a business perspective, for instance people who understand data how to slice and dice it, how to do statistical analysis and how to tie that into what the particular business needs are.
And business skills are very, very important as well. You need to make sure that you have the business involved in this organization as a member because they understand what the business requirements are, they understand how the business operates, they understand how this information is used and how these tools are used based on the abilities and the capabilities of their users.
So you put users from each of these organizations or the skill-sets within a BICC, and they will manage the strategy, the training, the solutions, the requirements gathering, establishing standards and also the marketing and evangelizing of business intelligence within the organization.
This sounds pretty complex and comprehensive, but you don’t have to start with all of this in place at once, you can start with a single project. Start establishing these standards. Start establishing these users and these organizations at a small level and build them as you mature and get the visibility and return on your investment that will help you to reinvest in building this out further.
So now let’s talk a little bit about a process to really help you dive into business intelligence within your organization to understand where the quickest wins are for focusing your energies on the top priorities. Start out with the current BI needs, baseline analysis. From our experience working with companies from different industries, we have noticed what are the typical BI challenges and pains that a particular line of business will have.
Whether it’s sales, marketing, finance, operations, or IT, whatever it is, through these common questions you can understand how painful these BI challenges are for them. And they will rate them. They will score them, and then we also ask the question about what is the business value of closing this gap, how beneficial is it, or what is the importance to you to close this gap, and they rate that as well.
This questionnaire allows us to come up with a gap analysis to show that wow, in this top right quadrant, we had the most painful business intelligence challenges but also the most beneficial to solve. So let’s starts focusing our energies on those versus these others that could be very painful but low value to solve or low impact.
Next do the same thing with your BI strategy. Basically we are taking the best practice categories and asking you questions as far as how do you develop this, how far have you executed, and what’s the value of closing this. And again, we do the gap analysis for both the BI needs, the BI strategy, and the execution to determine what the business priorities or the strategic priorities should be for you based on your own or the organization’s own rating of the gaps.
Finally, we reiterate what the business challenges are, the value of solving these business challenges and the recommendations to help you get started on solving those.