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

Chapter 7. Culture

Overview

Setting up a Business Intelligence Competency Center in your organization will bring about change:

• People will change jobs or responsibilities.

• The way in which individual departments work together will be organized differently.

• New processes will be introduced.

As a result, some people might gain power, while others might lose power. Preparing for these changes requires careful planning and an analysis of all the implications that the BICC setup will have on the organization. In this context, is it better to set up the BICC as a central team in a separate business unit or as a virtual team that includes representatives from different departments?

Introducing a common Business Intelligence (BI) architecture will require that the staff learn new tools and technologies and do away with "the old way" of doing things. Business users will have access to true business intelligence—perhaps for the first time—and this will increase their appetite for more. In the midterm or longer, this common architecture will raise a discussion around the BICC's funding. Thus, different opportunities for funding models should be examined.

Another important aspect to look at is how to evaluate the success of the BICC. But what should the performance metrics be? Some of them will be tangible, some intangible.

Further, methodology and standards need to be created, and compliance needs to be ensured. Best practices, techniques, programs, documentation, and the like should be collected ...