HDG Business Intelligence, LLC releases Business Intelligence Competency Center White Paper.

Jan. 22, 2011 - PRLog -- The Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) incorporates BI plus the processes and people needed to support it from a technical and non-technical basis. It is a requirement for a BICC to meet the following benefits to the organization:

1. Establishment of the BICC steering committee that is an organizational domain of business users and IT staff providing requirements, change management and process design.
2. Information Technology overall cost reduction through the commitment to current tools and human assets. Leverage existing infrastructure with minimal investment – limited to integration add-ons, existing software maintenance renewals and hardware.
3. Cost reduction in outsourced high skill staff and consulting through staff alignment to BI administration, data integration, and enterprise reporting development with dashboards, scorecards, guided AD Hoc and reporting.
4. Increased usage of business intelligence solutions by the non-technical users across the enterprise.
5. BICC represents a true centralized knowledge point for an organization – with domains, groups and users filtered to maintain data security and federation.
6. Delivery of information through portals with dashboards, libraries, and messaging.
7. Time to access to information is reduced by 50% for strategists, planners and analysts.
8. Predictive analytics is fully deployed to financial and revenue analysts.
9. Cost reduction in Information Technology development. AD Hoc reporting is fully deployed to users, mitigating requests for non-standard reports.
10. Operating cost is reduced within at least one organizational domain through increased access to information for analysis, performance measurement and planning.

BI vs. BICC?
It is not an adversarial relationship – it is the next step in taking BI from a cost center to a profit center. To understand this, it is best to understand the common concerns of business users(non-technical) within an organization:

1.They do not know where all the data actually lives – they know about most, if not all, of the applications throughout the organization, but they do not know how to access the information generated or it is only accessible through IT or the department that is a common user of that software. Translation: information is really hard to get if accessible at all.
2.Reporting usually comes from more than one application or reporting tool – there are usually more than one version of the truth when it comes to analyzing their data. Translation: users do not trust their own data or the data of others because it may conflict.
3.Information Technology owns the data – they administer it, secure it and are the only access point for information based in that data. We request reports from them and have them tailor the information so we can work with it. That can take a few minutes, hours, days or weeks to return waht we need. Translation: IT is a barrier that is too busy or does not understand my business requirement to help me be effective in my overall analysis.
4.We bought BI tools in the past – steering committees even were formed and evaluated the best for our business – but after a lot of fanfare, the reporting was limited to dashboards, giving prettier visualization but not answering our business needs as holistically as promised. Translation: we have been promised enterprise information, a single version of the truth, depth to the data for analysis, quick to real time access and the ability to analyze, plan and/or strategize more. We do not believe there is any BI tool that will deliver this.
All of these statements are true within most organizations that own BI tools. A Business Intelligence Competency Center is more than technology - business users drive the BICC, without them, it fails to establish.  It is also s  strategic and process shift within an organization to take ownership of its most valuable asset – the information it stores in databases, messaging, spreadsheets and various file formats. Once a BICC is established within an organization, the “single version of the truth” statement is real. Cost Center to Profit Center impact is very real. Reduction in overhead and increased productivity is the norm. Greater use of reporting is multiplied.

To Succeed, Most Fail First
In any organization of more than 500 employees and $70 million in annual revenue there are no less than three BI tools, with one being fully capable of enterprise reporting(Forrester, BI Overview 2009). Why? Without diving into the modern workplace too deeply, it is safe to say that paradigm shifts as attrition happens is a constant across all verticals. Strategic planning that shifts for an organization always impacts the type and availability of data. This creates a need to evaluate current technologies and acquire those that best match the needs of the business. While this makes sense for core applications, business intelligence is a little more agnostic. BI should always be a party of any shift and change process, but as a contributor to the change management process. Good BI tools may need re-design or development but rarely need to be holistically changed unless they are limited in their own architecture to meet the demands of the business. Application and data changes should be accounted for but not call for a new reporting environment.


The past decade(with two recessive economic cycles during that span it has taught the private sector companies, non-profit organizations and government entities two things:

1.The data they own is the most valued asset(CEO Insight, January 2010). An example of this comes from CIO Magazine, March 2010. The value of a laptop for a full time employee with more than 18 months of accumulation of documents, spreadsheet, and various files is an average of $300,000. The value of centralized customer data averages $36,000 per CRM instance(MK Consulting, 2010).
2.Decisions on a tactical and operational level need to be made based on the data within the enterprise(CEO Insight, January 2010).
Most organizations realize these points, but are slow to acknowledge them. A BI tool will often inspire the progression to leveraging more of the data asset as it will expand accessibility to the information needed and inspire visionaries within the company to require more from it. To accomplish the goal of the visionary, multiple reporting tools will often be leveraged to get an enterprise solution. The journey to this point will have bumps in the road, but once the destination to competency is achieved, the result provides an efficient organization that relies on its information to navigate its future successfully.


Life after the BICC Establishes
With the recovery of operational capital, enhanced technical skills sets, greater user involvement and strategic planning and forecasting becoming  pinpoint accurate, the BICC expands the “What If?” to a “What Next?” question. The Web 2.0 landscape has opened the door for more applications to be delivered through a browser as a service rather than an installed client. This means internal as well as external customers can have extended capabilities of self service functions that range from information analysis, updating their own information, product/service ordering, provide market information real time to gaining that 360 degree view of a customer, company, market, or vertical simply through the clicking of a mouse. Core applications such as accounting, ERP or Supply Chain oriented can be accessed through the browser, increasing user adoption. BICC organizations will often lead their own Software as a Service (SaaS) projects because of the efficient processes developed during the internal establishment phase. The re-usable process has the same effect: minimal investment, lower overhead, higher user acceptance and quick delivery of the now web based application.

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HDG Business Intelligence provides fully architected solutions for integration of clients data, applying data quality to it and then integrating with other applications as well as a reporting platform.