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Chapter 9:
Management of Business
Intelligence

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Outline

 Management of Business Intelligence

 Infrastructure
 Data Infrastructure
 Organizational Culture
 Structures
 Business Intelligence Governance
 Business Intelligence Competency Center
 Degree of Centralization of BI
 Processes
 Building the Business Case for BI
 Building Organizational Support
 Education
 Evaluation
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Intelligence
 Management of BI refers to the set of actions needed to
obtain the most value from the organization’s various BI
efforts.

 Incorporates

i: educating employees regarding BI

ii: evaluating benefits from BI

iii: building organizational support for BI

iv: developing & sourcing BI solns.

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Intelligence
 The set of actions related to management of BI can be viewed
in terms of three broad categories:
 Infrastructure – enhancing the quality of the BI infrastructure to
best support BI tools and solutions
 Structures – developing structures needed for management of BI
 Processes – establishing and using appropriate processes for the
day-to-day management of BI

 The three aspects mutually affect each other (see figure on

next slide)

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Management of Business
Intelligence (contd.)
An Overview of Management of Business Intelligence

Processes
•Creating a business case
•Building organizational support
•Education
•Evaluation
•Development
•Sourcing

Infrastructure
•Data infrastructure
•Organizational culture

Structures
•Governance
•Competency center
•Degree of centralization

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Infrastructure

 Two aspects
 Data infrastructure – success of BI depends considerably on the
data available in an organization
 Organizational culture – refers to norms and beliefs that guide the
behavior of org. members.

 Both have considerable effects on:

 The impacts of BI tools and solutions
 The structure and processes associated with the management of
BI

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Infrastructure - Data infrastructure

… #2
 Data quality is one of the most important technical factors for
successful BI. Data quality across following dimensions:
 Existence (whether the organization has the data)
 Validity (whether the data values fall within an acceptable range or
domain)
 Consistency (whether the same piece of data stored in multiple
locations contains the same values)
 Integrity (the completeness of relationships between data elements
and across data sets)
 Accuracy (whether the data describes the properties of the object it
is meant to model)
 Relevance (whether the data is the appropriate data to support the
business objectives).

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Infrastructure – Organizational
culture … #1

 Organizational culture: the norms and beliefs that guide the

behavior of the organization’s members.

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Infrastructure – Organizational
culture… #2
 A culture that values data and its utilization to pursue
opportunities and make data-based decisions more
conducive to BI. The so called “analytics culture.”

 Technology PLUS Analytics Culture  Successful BI

 Analytics culture and Success with BI are mutually reinforcing

Analytics culture

Success with BI

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Structures

 Three aspects
 Business Intelligence Governance
 Business Intelligence Competency center
 Degree of Centralization of Business Intelligence

 All play an important role in the management and impacts of

BI

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Structures - Business Intelligence

Governance … #1

 Business Intelligence Governance: the

guiding principles, decision-making
bodies, decision areas and decision rights,
and oversight mechanisms that are used to
encourage desirable behavior in the
management, development, and use of BI.

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Governance … #2
 Guiding principles: the overall beliefs for guiding the BI
vision and goals. Eg: developing criteria for the approval of
BI projects.

 Decision-making bodies: identifying the individuals or

groups that make the BI decisions, provide inputs and
sponsorship, and how these the individuals or groups
interact.

 Decision areas and decision rights: focus on the identification

of key types of decisions(investments in BI soln., BI adoption
and utilization etc) and allocates rights for making those
decisions to decision-making bodies.

 Oversight mechanisms: the formalized policies and

procedures for implementing BI governance and evaluating
progress.
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Competency Center
 Business Intelligence Competency Center: a cross-functional team
with specific tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for
supporting and promoting the effective use of business intelligence
across the organization.
 Facilitates the usage of BI throughout the org.
 Serves as a center for expertise related to BI
 Provides a central location for driving and supporting a company's overall
information delivery strategy
 Coordinates an organization's BI solutions and tools
 Helps share best practices across the organization
 Helps with data stewardship( metadata management, data standards, data
architecture, data quality )
 Vendor contracts management

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Structures - Degree of Centralization

of Business Intelligence
 May be viewed in two different ways:
1) Focus of the BI solutions at the organization
 BI solutions focused at the enterprise level: Greater
Centralization
 BI solutions focused at the departmental level: Greater
Decentralization
2) Extent to which the development of BI reports is centralized
 Reports are a standard part of the BI solution: Greater
Centralization
 Reports are mainly user-developed: Greater Decentralization
 A balanced approach to development of reports is
recommended

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Processes

 Building the Business Case for BI

 Building Organizational Support

 Education

 Evaluation

 Development
Discussed in Chapter 8
 Sourcing

 All play an important role in the management and impacts of

BI
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Processes - Building the Business

Case for BI
 BI efforts need resources. To get resources (and continue
getting them) we need:

A business case justifying investments in BI

 A business case may highlight organizational benefits from

BI efforts.

 Can you list some of the benefits of BI that can be highlighted?

 May be difficult to calculate ROI in quantitative terms. (Why?)

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Processes - Building Organizational

Support
 Build, and maintain, organizational support for BI as people:
 might be skeptical of the benefits from BI
 might feel threatened due to fear that their roles will be effected.
 may prefer making intuition or gut-feeling based decisions rather
than decisions based on information and analysis
 be just resistant to change

 But how to build and sustain organizational support?

 Start with a solid business case (might also show importance of BI to
users)
 Follow an incremental approach
 Redefine roles to show individuals how they would benefit from BI
 Manage expectations by getting users involved from the onset

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Processes - Education
 For continued success of BI keep current and potential users of
BI educated about its potential benefits, functionality, and use of
BI solutions and tools.

 Training certainly helps but education about BI is broader than

training and is ongoing…

 Keep updating the trained users’ BI knowledge by:

 Frequent communication
 Making education collaborative (e.g. web based sessions)
 Leveraging the BI competency center

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Processes - Evaluation
 Periodically revisit the expectations as per the business case
and utilize them as the baseline to determine if BI initiatives are
progressing as expected.
 That is, evaluate benefits and costs in terms of what was expected
and what has happened.

 Both solicited (e.g. via a survey) and unsolicited input from

users about the value of information from BI may be useful in
evaluation.

 The extent to which the BI projects are aligned with the

business strategy is a potentially useful criterion for evaluation.

 Lookout for implications of BI beyond the organization (e.g.

implications for customers and suppliers).

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Recap

 We have examined the

various actions related to
Processes
management of BI as part •Creating a business case
of three aspects which •Building organizational support
•Education
mutually affect each •Evaluation
•Development
other. •Sourcing

 Each aspect entailed Infrastructure

•Data infrastructure
several components. •Organizational culture

Structures
•Governance
•Competency center
•Degree of centralization

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Key Terms
 analytics culture
 business case for business
intelligence
 business intelligence
competency center
 business intelligence steering
committee
 data infrastructure
 education about business
intelligence
 evaluation of business
intelligence
 management of business
intelligence
 organizational support for
business intelligence

 data-driven decision making

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