Don't Forget About the Competency Centre!

Ok, I have to admit it, I've been spending a lot of my research time looking into trends in Business Intelligence technology and have not been focusing on the organizational structures necessary to support all these cool technologies and capabilities. *sigh* The danger of letting the technologist in me rule the day!

Thankfully with all the feeds I have coming into my news reader I have diversified enough to capture articles that pertain to not just the technology, but the people and underlying procesess necessary for a true enterprise Business Intelligence strategy.

The Business Intelligence Competency Centre or BICC is a key enabler to ensure we spend our money on the right BI investments and don't fall into the trap of siloed solutions with departmental implementations. As we push more and more power into the hands of our end users, the inherent danger is that we lose all that lovely centralized control the IT organization had over what reporting / BI applications are built and enhanced. For all your type A's out there this is a big blow I know...8)

If we ensure we join IT and the business together through a BICC then we have the ability to make informed business decisions on BI priorities and funding to extract the most value from these investments. Here is the article that brought this point back home to me if you are looking for a refresher (hint, if you work for me read it!).

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7297

Another area of research that is consuming my time is leveraging a rules based SOA architecture to inject analytics and intelligence into business processes. As I blogged before, here are some great blogs on this subject. There is an interesting parallel between rules based systems and future BI implementations. The standard mantra is that an IT organization can never keep up with the demand for changes and additions to information systems, we can only truly be successful by leveraging the business community to not only co-develop solutions but to author new solutions without the intervention of IT. When this is the case we can know we have empowered our clients with information in their hands to drive the most value from corporate data.

Then we can focus on the technology...8P

Mark