Communications and Technology Industry Research

The advent of the global marketplace, coupled with the power of the Internet, has helped many industries grow significantly, but also presents some important challenges. One of these is increased competition. Another is an increasingly customer service-oriented marketplace.

 

Successful companies in all industries must stay now stay agile, able to quickly change in response to market changes. They also must keep a keen focus on what their customers want, and make sure those customers are satisfied at all times.

 

One way to achieve these and other goals is to have a solid business intelligence (BI) strategy in place. Business intelligence broadly refers to applications, technologies and processes used to gather and analyze data  (such as sales, production and internal operations metrics) about company operations, and use that information to make smart business decisions.

 

As important as business intelligence is, though, it appears that  companies are not utilizing this management discipline to become more successful. That’s the finding in a new report out this week from Gartner (News - Alert). The research firm reported that many companies lack a cohesive strategy for BI implementations.

 

Because of this lack of focus on the importance of effective BI, Gartner predicts that now through 2010, most companies will end up spending 70 percent of their BI investments (both time and money) resolving issues involving people, processes and governance—rather than supporting the technology involved.

 

“Due to a lack of a cohesive strategy, many organizations have created multiple, uncoordinated and tactical BI implementations, which has resulted in silos of technology, skills, processes and people,” Gartner analyst Betsy Burton said in a statement.

 

Burton continued: “This organizational ceiling limits business and management from achieving business goals and leaves IT people and architects wary of supporting BI efforts. It is not only important to understand why these disconnections happen and the negative impact they can have on realizing the value and benefit of BI, but that they can also increase the total cost of ownership of BI for the whole organization.”

 

Because creating a balanced BI organizational structure is so important to the success of any BI initiative, Gartner looked deeply into the topic and came up with the following ten recommendations for companies looking to leverage this important management tool. All of these best practices center around the concept of what Gartner calls a “business intelligence competency center” or BICC.

Gartner recommends following 10 best practices when building a BICC:

1. Plan for a dynamic BICC that can be adjusted in scope and actions as needed

2. Get senior management involved by selecting a C-level sponsor

3. Choose members from departments across the company
4. Develop a mix of people, processes and technology capable of supporting different BI initiative phases
5. Build a solid BICC membership using incentives, not punishments
6. Create a business-driven priority list

7. Make the BICC an organization that can both lead and follow

8. Work with other competency centers within the company

9. Create appropriate avenues for input and responses
10. Measure and promote successes

All of these best practices highlight the fact that, without proper planning, even companies fully committed to utilizing BI will fall short of their goals. The lack of appropriate focus on BI generally also presents opportunities for savvy BI solution providers to step up to the plate.