 "'Competency Centre Helps To Use BI In A Pervasive Manner'")
In a one-on-one with Biztech2, Bhavish Sood, principal research analyst, Gartner, details the idea behind a BI Competency Centre and defines the CIO role associated with it.
What is the BI Competency Centre?
The concept of a competency centre was first incubated as a research idea by C K Prahalad and Gary Hamel, both renowned US professors. This concept basically spoke about three things: competency should define business value; it should not be easily imitable by competitors; and thirdly, it should provide business benefit. Thus, when you apply this concept of a competency centre and then apply it with BI, you derive competitive advantage and agility. Also, the idea behind BICC is that it helps the organisation to use BI in a much more pervasive manner, align its strategic objectives and KPIs with business benefits. It basically helps to build a funding model for BI to kind of exist and grow within the organisation.
What kind of skill set is required for BICC?
The skill sets required are predominantly on the technology and business side. On the technology side, you require IT as well as analytical skills, which include data warehousing, BI platform product understanding, skills on data quality and master data management. On the business side, you need a thorough understanding of how the company’s business operates, both with respect to its own business model and the vertical or horizontal or sector it is operating in. The ability to market the BICC concept within the organisation is also an important skill. A common skill required across these skill sets is programme management ability.
In an outsourced environment, how can a BICC be designed?
Large users of BI like financial services providers, telecom industries etc tend to outsource a lot. If you look at a typical bank or telco, a large part of the IT infrastructure is outsourced. In this scenario, the technology component of BICC will reside outside, but some of the core skills are still going to be within the organisation. Let’s say your business planning, which will trigger the use of BI, will still happen within the organisation, and your consumer of information or user of BI will also reside within the organisation. It’s only the technical nuts and bolts that will come from outsourcing. In order to efficiently manage such an environment, the company needs strong SLAs in terms of what is the periodicity of information and what is the latency etc.
Are Indian companies aware of the BICC concept?
Indian organisations know the BICC concept but often under a different name or terminology. There is no hard and fast rule that it has to be called BICC. There could be a very solid BICC (a separate central organisational unit providing BI services), a virtual one (comprising staff from different departments instead of a separate central unit) or a hybrid one.
Most organisations today are talking about having this kind of a competency centre. However, to say specifically how many Indian companies are following this model would be difficult. I would say with the exception of few large banks, I have not seen such pervasive use of BI in India. The reason for this being Indian companies are still implementing BI and data warehousing solutions.
What should be the roadmap to develop BICC within the organisation?
The first and foremost thing is to take stock of the company’s departmental BI. Then the company should identify the information needs of various users, every user may not like to look at reports all the time. People at the CEO or CXO level would probably want to see scorecards or dashboards. Once you have identified these things and you realise that the use of BI is getting pervasive, that’s when you start looking at a BI competency centre.
What could be the possible challenges?
The challenge lies in turning around the decision-making process to make it more facts based, to stop the spread of spreadsheets or an Excel kind of environment and finally, to tell people to start using a common platform across departments. A common platform with a data warehousing foundation will help to define a common set of metrics and a single version of the truth.
What are some of the major advantages of having BICC within the enterprise?
Firstly, BICC helps to centralise the decision-making process. The predominant decision making style in India, which could be defined as intuitive, gut based or past experience based will change with the adoption of BICC. Users will have to adopt a fact-based decision making style. It will also allow for a lot of transparency, and accountability among people, due to the audit abilities that are bundled into BICC.
What kind of role does the CIO play in the development of BICC?
The acronym CIO stands for Chief Information Officer, so it is critical for the CIO to provide information. BI is probably the only technology, which directly allows you to do that, so the CIO’s role is extremely critical. Based on the surveys we have done, I would say in the Indian context about 70-80 percent of BICCs are currently being run and managed by CIOs and I foresee that trend continuing in the months to come. Worldwide, the average is about 40-50 percent. Some BICCs, which have matured and are extremely well driven from a business point of view, are also being run by COOs, CEOs or even CFOs. However, the CIO’s contribution from a technology and programme management perspective will always remain significant.