BI Governance – How to Manage BI in Your Company

This week, I had the great pleasure of going to the 19th Annual Regional Conference which Gartner was holding in Tel Aviv. The subject was “Driving Profits and Performance with ICT”. I really wanted to share with you what fascinated me most there, a lecture about BI Governance from Andreas Bitterer - Research Vice President Data Management and Integration, Business Intelligence. 

Business Intelligence Governance

When an organization decides to implement a BI solution, it often faces the following problems:

·         BI is not a project, but rather a program – after you initiate a BI program, you find you gradually add more users and more data to it. Thus, as time goes by, you need to invest continuously in BI in the organization. Work doesn't finish on BI like work can be finished on a project. This concept needs to be dealt with in organizations building BI.

·         Sharing data in the organization also demands that the different units in the organization overcome internal politics that exist within the organization

·         Too much BI software - the organization runs BI software from too many different vendors.

·         The data quality problem - fixing and managing data. Data, more often than not, needs to be cleansed and checked. You need to have someone taking responsibility for the data.

·         Excel as front-end tool, not a DWH - too often, you find that organizations store their data in many excel files and so managing the data, understanding it and connecting it, becomes too difficult and complicated.

·         Define simply and accurately the question that needs to be answered - defining business terms and questions accurately will help you, the BI analyst and developer, answer your customers needs more easily.

Every organization that implements BI and wants to manage it wisely should create a BI Governance Team. The team should include IT workers and Business representatives from all the organization’s departments. Together, they should create a paper for the BI strategy of the organization. The paper should sum up the requirements (from the business representatives), look at the available resources and then prioritize the requirements. The paper should become the roadmap for the organization for the subject of BI.

Current trends in the world of BI:

1.       Standardizing the BI platform in the organization - buying from as few vendors as possible, according to our requirements as an organization.

2.       Deploying to users outside the organization – partners, suppliers and customers

3.       Integrated solution for enterprise applications (such as ERP) and BI

4.       Growing use of predictive analysis and data mining for planning and forecasting (moving from looking at our past in BI reports, to forecasting our future).

Though MR. Bitterer believes we will see more powerhouses (one stop shop vendors), he also believes that co-opetition will continue. You can (and will be able to) run one tool from one vendor on top of another tool from another vendor (BO which is owned by SAP can run on top of Microsoft's SQL Server).

Last but not least, I would like to thank Ron Shani, Itzik Ben David and Hamada Kais who gave me the opportunity to be in this very interesting  conference – thank you!