Information Systems Management, 32:229–233, 2015
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1058-0530 print / 1934-8703 online
DOI: 10.1080/10580530.2015.1044343
Business Intelligence Competency Center: Improving
Data and Decisions
Kyle Foster1, Gregory Smith2, Thilini Ariyachandra2, and Mark N. Frolick2
1
84.51, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
2
Williams College of Business, Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
This article describes the development of a business intelligence
competency center at a multi-line insurance company in the
Midwest. It outlines the organization’s problems which led to the
creation of the business intelligence competency center and the
steps taken to ensure a successful implementation. Through a
change in culture and use of an intermediary between end users
and the larger information technology area, a significant success
was achieved for all involved. Resulting from this experience is
a set of best practices for business intelligence competency cen-
ter implementation that, if followed, can lead to success for any
company.
Keywords business intelligence; business intelligence competency
center; data governance; data quality; IT
INTRODUCTION
Today’s competitive business environment requires com-
panies to collect, analyze, and interpret enormous quantities
of data to enable better, more informed decision making.
Fortunately, there is an abundance of data available for most
companies. However, without proper data quality and gover-
nance guidelines, these data might prove useless. Data quality is
a necessity when extracting meaningful information. For, with-
out it, a company may be left guessing at a direction or making
skewed decisions based on flawed data. So, in order to achieve
high quality, the data need to be accurate, available, under-
standable, and relevant to the problem being solved. Ultimately,
impactful, data-driven decisions are necessary for organiza-
tional survival. Unfortunately, the decision making capabilities
of a company are made significantly more complicated when
there is a lack of data confidence. This lack of confidence
adversely affects organizational performance. (IBM, 2008).
Among all industries, the insurance industry may be the
most reliant on quality data. Insurance companies derive their
profit by predicting the cost of future losses their insureds
Address correspondence to Thilini Ariyachandra, Williams College
of Business, Xavier University, 3800 Victory Parkway, Cincinnati, OH
45207, USA. E-mail: ariyachandrat@xavier.edu
229
will incur and creating pricing models to cover these and
operating costs. Many insurance and financial service organiza-
tions utilize a process for creating predictions which consists of
two primary steps: data acquisition and analytical processing.
While not unique, it allows for data consistency and integrity.
Unfortunately, not all processes are successful or timely.
In this article, New Tech Insurance is introduced, an insur-
ance company offering a vast array of insurance products. Like
other insurers, New Tech Insurance employed a silo approach to
data acquisition where it gathered data from several distinct sys-
tems. These different data sources often contained incomplete
segments of the same data, as well as slightly different versions
of the same data. Unfortunately, New Tech Insurance was tasked
with processing and making important decisions with this poor
quality data.
In addition, New Tech Insurance struggled with data sourc-
ing problems. New Tech Insurance spent more time assimilating
data than analyzing due to a largely manual data integration
process. A main cause was the manual task of correcting data
quality problems. At the same time, the company’s research and
development area was hindered by the lack of proper analytic
tools, so advanced analytics were outsourced. In short, a consis-
tent enterprise-wide data collection and analysis approach was
lacking.
In order to better capitalize on the wealth of information
being collected, as well as to correct its current data collection
issues, New Tech Insurance decided to create and implement
a business intelligence competency center (BICC). This article
provides an overview of New Tech Insurance, discusses the rea-
sons and plans for initiating its BICC, and examines the success
of the BICC.
NEW TECH INSURANCE AND BICC
New Tech Insurance is an insurance company operating in
23 states and offering property, casualty, and automotive insur-
ances, as well as excess and surplus lines of insurance to its
individual and business customers. The company was founded
with the idea to make insurance a one-stop shop for cus-
tomers and to operate through independent local agents. These
230 K. FOSTER ET AL.
local agents are commissioned based and not employed by the
company.
Given their extensive data collection and analysis problems,
New Tech Insurance saw the need to assess their data gover-
nance policies related to data collection and analytics. This led
to the creation of a BICC.
A BICC is a cross-disciplinary team assigned within a com-
pany who is charged with championing “BI technologies and
standards, as well as the business alignment, project prioritiza-
tion, management and skills issues associated with significant
BI projects.” (Strange & Hostmann, 2003). The success or fail-
ure of such a group is primarily dependent upon the composition
and skills of the team.
The BICC Initiative
Prior to the creation of its BICC, New Tech Insurance had
a single IT organization known as the IT Data Management
Group. This unit managed all matters related to technology
including developing reports for business users. Given that the
IT Data Management Group managed all technology issues for
the company, its workload steadily increased as the company
grew.
In addition, a constraint developed in the report creation
process for business users. The problem centered on the IT
Data Management Group not being able to create exactly what
the business users truly needed in a timely manner. As such,
there appeared to be a communication gap between the IT Data
Management Group and the business users. This problem led
to the IT Data Management Group creating reports for business
users which were not used because the amount of time it took
to create the reports exceeded their usefulness. So, instead of
using the generated reports, business users sought the skills of
experts within the organization to help generate reports which
led to a lack of confidence in the IT Data Management Group
and its ability to deliver quality and timely data.
New Tech Insurance faced a difficult dilemma as it had
several key problems to address. They included:
• The ever growing work for the IT Data Management
Group;
• The lack of effective communication between the IT
Data Management Group and business users;
• The lack of data quality standards;
• The need for better analytic tools.
So, in 2008 a multi-departmental committee was formed
to combat these issues. This committee decided to dedicate
a team to bridge the gap between business users and the
IT Data Management Group while simultaneously improv-
ing the analytical capabilities of the company. With top-
down support from the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the
BICC was created. For New Tech Insurance, they see their
BICC as a hybrid organization combining technical and func-
tional resources to manage information delivery. At the same
time, the BICC collaborates within the business to improve
analytical capabilities and deliver information solutions in
support of its strategic objectives. The center was to serve
as a business-led, internal consulting, analysis, and support
organization.
Individuals with the right skill sets were essential to take
on a project of this size and importance. For the BICC to be
successful, the team required members to have the ability to
communicate directly with business users as to gain a more
holistic understanding of their needs, both in terms of content
and time. In addition, these individuals required a technological
background to understand how to accomplish the specific tasks
required by the business users. Over 120 individuals within the
organization were interviewed for the BICC team. What started
as a team of one grew steadily as the responsibilities of the
BICC expanded.
The underlying mission of the BICC was to empower
strategic decision makers to accomplish important business
objectives through a structure with strict data governance and
information delivery. The BICC was to act as a liaison between
analysts in the lines of business and the IT Data Management
group. In order for it to work, the BICC needed to be business
centric, rather than IT centric. This allowed it to better meet the
needs of the lines of business it supports.
Even though it was to be business oriented, the BICC still
had technical responsibilities. Since there is overlap between
the objectives of the IT Data Management and the BICC,
there were varying opinions regarding roles and responsibili-
ties. So, New Tech Insurance created guidelines regarding the
responsibilities of the newly created BICC and clarified the
responsibilities already in place for the IT Data Management
Group (see Table 1). For example, the BICC was charged
with developing the Cognos reports and dashboards, while the
IT Data Management Group was charged with administering
the created Cognos reports and dashboards. This separation
of responsibilities was essential for two reasons. First, each
group was able to follow its own mission and vision. Second,
the separation of powers easily pacified conflicts when dis-
crepancies surface. The BICC was aligned under the CFO in
order to keep its focus on improving the company’s competi-
tive business edge. The IT Data Management Group remained a
traditional IT team under the direction of the Chief Technology
Officer.
The CFO saw the critical success factors for the BICC to
be its ability to effectively and efficiently manage its responsi-
bilities and deliverables, while reducing the cost of providing
information to the core analytic processes.
Addressing Key Issues of Analytical Processing and Data
Governance
The BICC helped to address several key challenges that New
Tech Insurance previously faced with its BI efforts under the IT
Data Management Group.
 BICC
TABLE 1
BICC/IT Responsibilities
BICC
Semantic layer design
Cognos report and dashboard development
Data profiling
Data dictionary/Functional metadata
Business reporting requirements
Prioritizing change requests and development of (Cognos,
SAS, IDL, ETL, and EDW work)
Cognos/SAS end user training
Sandbox starter set design
Data quality requirements for ETL
Data governance and quality process
Conceptual data model validation and design
Prior to the BICC, the IT group lacked timeliness with the
delivery of data requested by business users. As a result, busi-
ness users would turn to select power users within their own
groups to assist in report creation. At first these power users
enjoyed the recognition of their sought after skills, but, in time,
it became too difficult to accomplish their own responsibilities
with this additional burden.
The BICC recognized that providing business users with
data they requested in a timely manner and helping them with
their specific reporting needs increased their satisfaction sig-
nificantly. The BICC also realized an opportunity to give the
business a self-service data reporting application when they
implemented Cognos, a business intelligence and performance
management software suite. This software would ultimately
allow business users to satisfy their own reporting needs as it
provides novice users with the ability to extract, report, visu-
alize, and analyze data. This necessary acquisition helped to
reduce business user dependency on the IT Data Management
Group and focused their attention to the BICC for their infor-
mation reporting needs.
Prior to the creation of the BICC, no enterprise wide
data governance policy existed. So, data analysts and busi-
ness users experienced less than satisfactory results when
analyzing data. Often, the development of reports and infor-
mation processing were delayed by the lack of consistent,
well-defined data. The BICC put forth a strong governance
process to aid in the creation of impactful enterprise deci-
sions. As such, the BICC sets-up and maintains definitions for
data collected from the company’s business insurance oper-
ations. It schedules and facilitates periodic meetings for its
oversight committee, the Enterprise Data Governance Council.
The Council ensures data stewards across multiple organiza-
tions are kept abreast of new and on-going changes to corporate
data. A Data Governance Manager, who works in the BICC, was
231
IT Data Management
Semantic layer design and build
Administration (SAS, Cognos, Infosphere)
Data profiling
Technical metadata
ETL (IDL, EDW, DQ, etc.)
Administrate EDW, IDL, Data marts
Cubes/OLAP development
Starter sets creation
Report scheduling
Sandbox environment support
Conceptual/Logical/Physical data model creation, validation,
and design
charged with chairing a data stewardship committee which is
responsible for:
• Defining data across the enterprise;
• Improving data quality;
• Resolving data integration issues;
• Providing data usage policy and quality standards;
• Determining data security;
• Maintaining business rules applied to data and data
retention criteria.
In addition, a data glossary was developed and deployed to
help increase quality. This directory helped to centralize the def-
inition of individual data elements and the business areas they
support.
New Tech Insurance also fell short with enterprise-wide
quality standards and assessments. This resulted in root cause
analysis and resolution being performed inconsistently and
largely unchecked. The BICC put forth a goal to have the data
quality processes be both proactive and reactive. Proactive pro-
cesses help prevent data quality issues from occurring as they
enable business process improvement and early involvement in
new information systems initiatives. Reactive processes, such
as the collection and resolving of data quality issues, feed back
into the proactive process by means of lessons learned.
Now, the BICC provides support to data creation areas based
on the knowledge gained through data quality issue resolution.
It also prepares and publishes a data quality scorecard which
enables the organization to gauge its progress on improving data
quality. The BICC also works with the data stewards to help
maintain data validation rules which enforce enterprise data
standards, achieve key quality goals, and ensure root causes are
addressed.
Finally, the BICC addressed analytical process sharing. Prior
to the BICC, analysis performed throughout the organization
232 K. FOSTER ET AL.
was segregated by departmental units. By creating analytical
silos, the company increased the amount of conflicting mea-
sures, redundant efforts, and decision making based on inac-
curate information. The BICC catalogs the analytics dispersed
throughout the company, validates the accuracy of the methods
and results, and posts the analyses to an online repository which
is available to all appropriate employees broadly.
The BICC is also able to provide formatted data sets for sta-
tistical analysis. This enables actuaries to easily model data and
design insurance lines with more precision. At the same time,
self-service reporting through Cognos has allowed underwriters
to decrease the amount of time needed to accomplish their tasks
from weeks to minutes. These accomplishments have saved the
company both time and money.
BICC BEST PRACTICES
The implementation of the BICC at New Tech Insurance
addressed several key data and process issues in data gover-
nance and practices. These translated into major tactical and
financial gains for New Tech Insurance. The success of the
BICC posits several best practices for organizations attempting
to implement BICCs.
The first key is securing top down support from an executive
sponsor willing to champion the project. This executive sponsor
must be directly engaged with the project. This will help elimi-
nate barriers and keep the project on point during difficult times.
For, without an executive sponsor, a project’s chance of failure
is much higher than with one.
The second key is assigning tasks to the BICC away from
other units to avoid redundancy and ease process bottlenecking.
For New Tech Insurance, the transfer of responsibilities from
the IT Data Management Group to the BICC helped to reduce
data and task redundancy while allowing the BICC to take con-
trol of some responsibilities formally managed by the IT Data
Management Group. The result was the BICC acting as the liai-
son between business users and traditional IT support. But, with
the BICC acquiring more responsibilities, another group must
lose some. This shift of responsibilities may have a “stepping on
toes” reaction by those groups losing some of their responsibili-
ties. However, in order for the BICC to achieve success, the shift
of responsibilities is absolutely necessary. Those losing respon-
sibilities will gain capacity and acquire other responsibilities
which can be more focused to their core competencies.
Third, organizations should seek and celebrate early wins.
For a project of this magnitude, early wins allow for a gain
in confidence in the BICC and its team. In addition, early
wins also help improve the confidence of individuals within the
BICC. “The most important implication of the progress prin-
ciple is this: By supporting people and their daily progress in
meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work
lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term
performance” (Amabile & Kramer, 2011, p. 12).
Fourth, the organization must live the adage “teach them
how to fish.” Strive to empower business users with self-service
applications. A self-service approach allows business users to
work more efficiently by completing tasks on their own and
lifting the constraint on others who are often left to support
when assistance is needed. Through self-service, employees
gain efficiency and essential skills while the company saves
money.
Fifth, it is important to define architecture for different
components of the BI infrastructure while continuously updat-
ing and maintaining data standards, methodologies, definitions,
processes, tools, and technologies required to support BI.
Without companywide standards, it is a challenge for different
aspects of the company to work together.
Sixth, a company needs to create a success roadmap with
metrics which measure both the implementation and ongoing
success of BI. It is also important to communicate successes
and demonstrate how the BICC is enabling the organization to
meet its BI goals. A common scorecard should be created to
help visualize the progress made and the goals still unattained.
Finally, for a proper and successful implementation of a
BICC, soft skills prove to be more important than technical
skills. For, as Eckerson (2005) states, “Successful technical
teams score especially well on the ‘soft issues,’ such as the abil-
ity to communicate technical issues clearly, respond to business
requirements, and develop desired functionality.” The individu-
als on the BICC team must possess the ability to communicate
and understand business users’ needs and translate those needs
into technical requirements.
CONCLUSION
Reflecting on the successes New Tech Insurance, it is clear
that progress was due to the implementation of the BICC.
However, as with any organization, no goal or implementation is
ever complete. As technology advances, the BICC will improve
upon its accomplishments. As Zeid (2006, p. 20) states, “It is a
journey, not a destination. Changing internal culture and knowl-
edge mechanisms is a slow process. You are embarking on an
ongoing process that will pay significant dividends in the long
term.”
As it evolves, the BICC would like to integrate its services
companywide and steer away from a pool of select power users.
In order to accomplish this goal, the BICC is developing a user-
friendly dashboard system to replaces its current reporting tool.
Dashboards will allow individual, novice users to manipulate
data and solve problems in real-time, thus alleviating the load
on the power-users. Ultimately, this should free up the IT Data
Management Group to work on more important projects, and
give regular business users more freedom in their work.
AUTHOR BIOS
Kyle Foster is a Data Solution Consultant at 84.51 (formerly
dunnhumbyUSA). He is responsible for the implementation
of data strategy and relationships clients. Prior to join-
ing dunnhumbyUSA, he worked as a consultant for Sogeti
 BICC
USA. Mr. Foster earned a Master of business administration
with a concentration in business intelligence from Xavier
University.
Gregory Smith is an associate professor of MIS in the Williams
College of Business at Xavier University. His primary
research areas are the application of artificial intelligence
in predictive analytics and data mining. He has pub-
lished in the International Journal of Business Intelligence
Research, IJPR, and Advances in Business and Management
Forecasting.
Thilini Ariyachandra is an associate professor of MIS at
Williams College of Business at Xavier University. Her main
research area is BI and data warehousing. She has pub-
lished in Decision Support Systems, Information Systems
Management, Business Intelligence Journal, and the DM
Review.
Mark N. Frolick is a professor of MIS in the Williams College of
Business at Xavier University and the holder of the Western
and Southern Chair in Management Information Systems.
233
He is considered to be a leading authority on business intel-
ligence and has authored over 150 articles. His research
has appeared in such prestigious journals as MIS Quarterly,
Decision Sciences, Journal of Management Information
Systems, Decision Support Systems, and Information and
Management.
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Amabile, T. M. & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The power of small wins. Harvard
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Eckerson, W. W. (2005). Assessing your organization’s readiness for
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International Business Machines. (2008). Building a business intelligence com-
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White_Paper_Building_a_BICC.pdf
Strange, K. H. & Hostmann, B. (2003). BI competency center is core to BI
success. Gartner Group White Paper. Retrieved from https://www.gartner.
com/doc/400976/bi-competency-center-core-bi
Zeid, A. (2006). Your BI competency center: A blueprint for successful
deployment. Business Intelligence Journal, 11(3), 14–20.
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