Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage

Chapter 6. Knowledge Processes

Overview

One of the key tasks of a Business Intelligence Competency Center is to overcome the information jungle, where information is retrieved and published according to a group's—or most often to an individual's—liking, without any accountable or documented process behind it. This leads to information chaos, where reports from different people do not reconcile or are simply not available, and where all information providers claim that their reports are correct. On a higher level, some agreement might have been reached within a department or business unit, but there is no way of obtaining a corporate view, because different rules, tools, and processes are used, no data cleansing has occurred, and there is no audit trail.

How can a BICC overcome these problems?

The BICC needs to establish knowledge processes to enable a common view across the organization, using consistent rules and standards. That resulting information then needs to be made available to every person in the organization who has a need for it. Corporate rules of data availability and data access rules need to be adhered to.

Note: The term knowledge processes refers to processes that deal with these issues:

• How information is generated, validated, and used

• How information is tied to performance metrics and reward systems

• How the organization supports its commitment to the strategic use of information

To be valid for the whole organization, knowledge processes need to be built using a common ...