Understanding the value of a BI Center of

Excellence
By Joe Roberts•June 28, 2013•Enablement, Microsoft BI, QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects,
Standards•Comments Off

A Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI CoE) concept was developed to provide
governance, development and application of standards and best practices, training and education,
centralized vendor relationships and cross-departmental organization related to the deployment
and existence of Business Intelligence solutions across the enterprise. When most organizations
begin to conceptualize a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence they ask the same question
“Do I need a BI Center of Excellence”. Here are some conditions that might exist in your
organization that a BI CoE is specifically designed to help resolve.

1. Are you concerned that you are spending too much on BI?
2. Do you have multiple, uncoordinated, on-going BI implementations?
3. Do users distrust the data available or do not have the data they need to perform their
analysis?
4. Are you missing a formal approach to documenting processes, creating content, or
facilitating ongoing maintenance or usage?
5. Can you align your Business Intelligence content with your corporate objectives and
strategies?
6. Are you still looking for a “single version of the truth” despite the existence of BI?

Many organizations have deployed multiple departmental BI solutions over the years, often
involving multiple BI vendors, with little or no consideration for the impact to the corporation.
This could be due to a lack of corporate strategy for Business Intelligence, a lack of
communication between business units or a corporate structure that does not lend itself to strong
centralized BI. More often it is the latter: a structure that is not conducive to strong centralized
Business Intelligence at a corporate level. While BI is intended to eliminate data silos, a structure
which decentralized BI content creates analytic silos. These silos, at the end of the day, often
produce a less desirable result than that which would have existed with had the BI solution been
centralized at the onset.

Multiple departmental solutions increase the visibility and use of BI, but this is not always
positive. These solutions are small and disconnected, apply unique sets of standards and
practices (if they have standards at all) and often produce their own data warehouses and data
marts with little or no connection to corporate strategies. By definition they increase the
likelihood of violating the cornerstone of Business Intelligence, a single version of the truth.
They often produce the opposite an effect that from the desired single version of the truth. This
effect is not multiple versions of the truth, which technically can’t happen, but multiple versions
of a lie. In essence all of the answers are different from each other and none are correct.
The term Center of Excellence is often debated. Some think it is too haughty but whether you
call it a Center of Excellence, a Center of Competence or a BI Business Unit the foundation is
still the same. A CoE combines the vital roles of governance, subject matter expertise, training
and education , technical expertise, platform services, data services, BI vendor management and
project oversight together to ensure all areas of the enterprise can align their BI initiatives with
corporate strategy

The role of a CoE is to govern and execute BI across the enterprise with specific concentration
toward:

 BI Standardization
 Training and Education
 Continuous Process Improvement
 Best Practices definition and promotion
 BI Project oversight and management
 Platform Architecture
 Data Architecture
 Data Quality
 Meta Data and Semantic Layer Management
 Centralized Support and Vendor Relationships
 Application Platform Administration

The primary goals of a BI CoE are:

 Drive overall success and adoption of Business Intelligence content

 Ensure that BI use is aligned with corporate strategy. Ensure the consistent application
of standards and best practices for BI initiatives.
 Provide a standardized, sustainable and scalable, enterprise wide environment for BI
delivery.

Without a centralized authority these small departmental solutions remain disconnected from the
corporate strategy, using disparate tools and data sources, and even more importantly, using
disconnected business logic and definitions. This not only raises the cost of ownership for BI
across the organization, but produces inefficiencies. It is important to remember that Return-On-
Investment (ROI) for BI is often soft ROI, meaning that the real value of BI is found in better
and faster decision making. The greatest measure of ROI is how effective it is in improving the
speed and accuracy of decision making for the entire enterprise.

BI CoE Structure
The BI Coe is comprised of a permanent multidisciplinary team that includes leaders from all
areas of BI related effort. This team can be a separate business unit or a specialized subset of IT,
but it should be staffed with CoE specific resources responsible only to the CoE. It should also
include, but not be limited to:
  BI Platform Architects
 BI Application Administrators
 Semantic Layer Architects
 Content Creation Experts
 Business Subject Matter Specialists
 ETL Specialists
 Data Warehouse and Database Administrators

Other subject area specialists who should at least participate in governance and troubleshooting,
even if they are not directly responsible only to the BI CoE are:

 Network Infrastructure Specialists

 Network Authentication Administration
 Operating System and Hardware Administrators
 Web Server Administrators
 Business Analysts with source data knowledge

One of the biggest obstacles for the CoE is the provision of support and troubleshooting
expertise. Enterprise BI products touch all portions of the enterprise including network
infrastructures that are not directly related to BI. Without a clear line of responsibility back to the
CoE, cooperation and support from these other IT areas is often inconsistent and inefficient
resulting in delayed response to the resolution of user issues. This can cause a reduction in BI use
and adoption, driving down the ROI.

The overarching goal of a strong centralized BI Center of Excellence should be to promote “self-
service” in the user community. It is important to note here that “self-service” does not mean
self-reliance. Self-Service without guidance, enforcement and governance leads to anarchy and
eventually chaos in Business Intelligence initiatives, which is ultimately detrimental to executing
on corporate strategy and can be very costly.

A Logical Sub-Division
Within the structure of your CoE a natural sub-division of required skills exists. This natural
division between the collection and storage of data, and the extraction and dissemination of
information is common. Some people refer to it as [1]“Get Data In” and Get Data Out” but
regardless of what you call this skill division, it is important to think about the organization and
alignment of your CoE team. While a high degree of technical expertise exists on both sides of
this division, one is more technically facing than the other. The skills associated with collecting
and managing data tend to be more technical, while skills associated with accessing and
disseminating information (content creation) are more business related.

Data Collection

The data collection and management team focuses on the technical side of BI, providing the
proper data to the BI platform and maintaining data integration and data quality expertise. This
team is highly focused on data quality, data detail (granularity), user centric summary data and a
dependable, agile data platform. This team should:

 Set standards for data quality and data integration processes

 Communicate with the Information distribution (BI content and platform) team on user
requirements and data availability
 Capture and document best practices related to data collection and transformation
 Define processes for quick ramp up and to accommodate consistent timely data
requirement changes
 Provide a flexible, reliable, efficient platform for data delivery including scalability
features to meet the ever increasing data volume requirements by the users.

Ideally the data collection team would discover and fix inefficiencies and deficiencies in the data
before the users do. This team should be responsible for data reliability and accuracy for all
users.

Information Distribution

This team focuses on the more traditional BI requirements and is more user facing. It will
develop and maintain expertise in:

 How the business units interface with Business Intelligence

 Platform and data security and privacy
 User training and education
 Creating Standards for information consumption across the enterprise
 Definition and enforcement of best practices for content creation and data consumption
 Semantic Layer structure and usability
 User support for process improvement and compliance
 BI project coordination, management and oversight
 Communication with the Data Collection team on user requirements, data quality and
availability
 BI platform architecture scalability and meeting user demand

The makeup of the Information Distribution team is often a mix of technical resources and line
of business personal with skills in business analysis. Part of their job is to define standards and
practices and provide training and education, but often the most difficult skill to cultivate is
communication and understanding of how the business units consume the information.

The Gartner Group describes Business Intelligence as an “iterative, user-centric process”. Those
three words are critical to providing high level Business Intelligence.

 Iterative – It is impossible to accomplish everything at once. In the end, everything is

nothing.
 User-centric – The users must be able to access the information they need, when they
need it. If they cannot, the lack of user acceptance will nullify all of your hard work .
  Process – BI is a process, not an event. There is no end!

The end goal of the Information Distribution team is to define and execute to this end.

Conclusion
While the Center of Excellence is much more than a concept or a set of rules or even a corporate
structure it is a critical path in providing sustainable, supportable BI. This level of Business
Intelligence has been an unrealized goal since its inception. Too often those tasked with
providing BI spend more time “putting out fires” and have little time for producing good BI. The
evolution of technology into the corporate landscape required companies to re-think their
organizational structure and BI must renew that debate. Business Intelligence is a process, not an
event and the BI Center of Excellence is vehicle for that transformation in understanding.