Week 14 - Implementing Enterprise Business Intelligence System

A company can either outsource to a company to do BI or setting up one within the company. And that is Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC).

According to SAS, BICC is a cross-functional team with a permanent, formal organizational structure. It is owned and staffed by the client and has defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for supporting and promoting the effective use of business intelligence and performance management across the organization.

There are some challenges in implementing BI system according to this week lecture slides.

• Inconsistent BI deployments
• Difficulty in managing, implmenting and supporting BI initiatives that span multiple departments
• Lack of standardisation of methodologies, definitions, processes, tools and technologies
• Insufficient BI skills
• Need for comprehensive, strategic approach to BI that addresses technology as well as people, processes and organisational culture
  

Once these challenges are being overcome, it will bring benefits to the organisation.

SAS stated that a recent survey performed by BetterManagement.com titled "How do you plan for Business Intelligence?", organizations with a BI Competency Center see the following benefits:

• Increased usage of business intelligence (74 percent)
• Increased business user satisfaction (48 percent)
• Better understanding of the value of BI (45 percent)
• Increased decision-making speed (45 percent)
• Decreased staff costs (26 percent)
• Decreased software costs (24 percent)

This actually shows that how BICC benefited an organisation.

This week lecture slide also talks about some of the functions of BICC. SAS also mentioned the functions of BICC.

The more common ones will be:

• BI Program Management Office (BI PMO)
• Data Stewardship
• Vendor Management
• Information Management
• Information Delivery
  

Functions of BICC (Taken from SAS web site)

There are four steps in establishing a BICC:

1. Initialisation
2. Definition of a BICC plan
3. Establishment of BICC
4. BICC in operation

These are the factors which organisation will need to take notice of as it normally contributes to the failure of BICC:

• Costs
• Organisational structures/political
• Lack of management support
• Technological failures
• Over reliant on BI system and ad-hoc reporting
• Disrupt well-establish reporting cycles
• Reacting too swifty resulting in destability inorganisation

Besides this, BICC normally are not being recognised in an organisation. This is because it does not show results/benefits in dollars and cents. Instead, it only provides information. Other than that, departments may tend not to rely on BICC as it add burdens to their budget and they may not trust what BICC can do for them. Hence, management support is very important so as for them to initiate department to fully utilise BICC.

I would like to recommend this SAS link (as posted earlier on in this post) as it talks in details about BICC functions.