Apologies, I have had replying to your comments on my to-do-list for a while now.

I like the virtual BICC model, with a central team as the core, but supplemented by embedded BI people in strategic locations (or business units). The second group of people ensure responsiveness to local needs, but within the consistent framework laid out by the central group. It is sort of a hub and spoke arrangement I guess.

We are 100% in the same place on the need for change skills in a BI and BICC context.

Thanks for your comments.

Peter

Indeed, an interesting article you wrote.

I have some remarks, though. I agree that a BICC should include the Data Warehouse part as well, but if it suppose to contain also all business areas of an organisation, this can become a bottleneck in its own way.
Therefore, would you rather not favour a BICC that only delivers central BI projects and provides standards and guidelines but leaves the really domain specific BI solutions to the local BI teams within the business areas?

My second remark concerns your own job description. I’ve also worked on the creation of a BICC. Although it was all initiated by declaring one BI tool standard, we ended up dealing mostly with people and processes aspects than discussing about that standard or a BI technical issue. My personal experience is indeed that creating a BICC is more about change management (not the ITIL term!) than about the tools standards and BI architecture one wants to impose. Starting from a change management perspective has far better results than the rather technical BI architectural perspective.

Thank you for your comments, with which I 100% agree. Where the BI team sits is in no way as important as it actually being a team.

Peter

Can, we two discuss further on this? my contact address is sh_bangash@yahoo.com

I really enjoyed your article and from my opinion and perspective of a BICC, hit the nail on the head.

My experience around BICC’s and BI in general have allowed me to realise some important points and especially relating to the comments/questions from Shahid I have the following to offer.

The DW in IT and BI/BICC in business debacle has reference. In my opinion, this is never a good setup. These should always be combined and whether the combination is in IT, as in your case and because you are perhaps more comfortable with it, or in the business is not really the issue. The issue is that it should be combined and consist of the skills that you have so wonderfully laid out. These skills mentioned are critical in my opinion for successful BI. What I have seen when the two areas are split between IT and business is that IT get inundated with requests for changes to such a degree that they become frustrated and make comments like “business does not know what they want” etc. Then they design methods and procedures to handle this chaos. Then they have priority listings of jobs to be done, ticket or event numbers to track jobs, call centres to handle requests etc. At the end of the day the IT guys stand back and say “Job well done. We are now organised. We have processes in place. This is our average delivery time, amount of requests handled etc etc” and pat themselves on the back. And business then complain that they cannot get changes done as quick as what they would like. And this is perhaps one of the secrets of BI: agility. A new request or change, especially coming from a group like the BICC with the skill sets described by you, will usually be valid and required and not a waste of time. Something in business triggered the change or request and an answer is required.

So with the two groups split, this is what I find usually happens. The Warehouse cannot move at the pace required by a good BICC. If these are combined this issue disappears and allows the BICC to be agile.

I am not sure if you are in agreement with this or not, but this is merely my experience.

Regards

Thomas Arpin

Too many acronyms with the same letters! I have a hard enough time distinguishing Chief Information and Chief Investment Officers.

Marketing is certainly one of the areas that sometimes is the genesis of BI projects. I have worked very closely and very well with senior marketing managers on helping to instil a strong sales culture using BI.

Having said that, it is generally my strong opinion that BI works best when it covers many aspects of what an operation does (see this earlier article on the subject). Given this, marketing would seem to be an odd place for it to reside in the long term.

Of course I make these comments with no firsthand knowledge of your organisation and there may be some very good reason specific to you why the CMO is the best person to guide BI.

All the best

Peter