Many authors have written about “what is business intelligence?” and “What Business Intelligence(BI) is not?” Businesses are deliberating on how to measure the return on investment (ROI) for an enterprise Business Intelligence(BI) solution. Various success recipes for a good business intelligence and analytics program implementation are also being sort by business intelligence software companies. Some of the successful BI programs, big or small, which I have been associated with, have two important mantras.
First is a mechanism to compare organization goals and measures with actual at different levels of business. Second is quantification and communication of the benefits in addressing the gap. In a Nutshell it needs to be part of the business or process improvement framework.
In this article, I would like to put some examples and best practices I have experienced. Is this Framework similar to BICC (Business Intelligence Competency Center) or a BI COE? One of the auto parts manufacturing major I have worked with never had both of these centers. But the business leaders in this company were able to show the investors, millions in savings with a successful business intelligence and performance management framework up to the lowest operational units. So what did they have?
The BI framework they have has the following components.
1. Infrastructure to produce consistent and comparable Information of performance indicators
2. Platform to evaluate, rank and collaborate best practices from the top performers
3. Institutionalize improvement program with executive sponsorship
4. Identify new performance monitoring areas and (or) targets.
5. Communicate and share the benefits on improvement.
That’s it? You are right. It is said that simple. But different organizations constitute these parts of framework in isolation and with different vigor. The auto parts manufacturing major I mentioned earlier, for example, has a framework with.
(i). Technical team to source the operational data and process the performance indicators. They are a group of IT and Data Analyst to provide the information tools and services on the performance indicators with comparisons, ranks, gap with targets, improvement trends etc.
(ii). Corporate business leadership has constituted a team led by senior vice-president directly reporting to CEO to lead this framework. Let me call this team as Performance management team or PM team. Directly reporting to VP are Business Analysts from finance, sales, operations, planning etc. to facilitate the business leaders to monitor and report the performance and benefits on a monthly basis.
(iii). The projects derived to address the gap are integrated through organization’s six-sigma initiatives .
(iv). A steering committee headed by the business unit heads revisit & revise on a quarterly basis.
(v). Very active involvement of corporate communication team and Human resource (HR) team facilitated by PM team. The activities involve communication within the organization, investors, press etc. and employee recognition. This status is definitely the scenario of a well matured BI framework. The above mentioned corporation started this frame work for one business unit and single geography before rolling out to entire organization worldwide.
Please write to me for more questions or suggestions.