Ten Recommendations for a Highly Effective Business Intelligence Competency Center

This chapter presents some recommendations for a highly effective Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). Evolving the intelligent enterprise is a complex task that requires promoting and supporting the use of information for decision making at all organizational levels. Management needs to believe that Business Intelligence (BI) can be used to drive the business forward. Management must make this support visible to the rest of the organization by giving executive sponsorship to the BICC concept and by assigning the BICC a prominent and influential place in the organization, where it can operate with authority. The BICC needs to act as a broker that brings together business understanding and technology expertise. The BICC needs to translate business questions into technology and the answers back to the business. The BICC should be there to stay and it should not be treated as a project with a start and end date. Integrating BI into the business would be an ongoing process and the organization would never feel that all its BI needs have been addressed. To achieve organizational buy‐in and implement the vision, it is important to define measurable and realistic objectives that are transparent to all stakeholders as well as the BICC. That translates into concrete short‐term achievements that prove the tangible value of the BICC. The BICC should oversee all BI‐related initiatives on an organizational level and guard against overlap, redundancy, and information silos.