Governance as applied to business intelligence (BI) is the process of defining and implementing a decision support infrastructure that will support the enterprise set goals. Jointly owned by IT and its partners in the business, the process sets the direction and evolves the value of BI as a corporate strategy.
Yet, how can this be applied when the organisation outsources its entire BI competency to a consulting company - to the extent that the consulting house is also responsible to drive the value of BI within that organisation? Can this isolate the organisation from what is happening in the real world?
In this case it should become the responsibility of the consulting companies to educate its client and ensure the client always receives the best possible guidance, advice on BI roadmaps, best practice solutions, latest technologies. It is also crucial for the consultants to educate the client on how they should be governed.
The BI governance environment normally revolves around decision-making and oversight. It is an ever-changing framework that serves many business functions, a variety of interests, and a wide range of needs. In particular, it should cover the following:
* Clearly defined authority and accountability, roles and responsibilities.
* Programme planning, prioritisation, and funding processes.
* Communicating strategic business opportunities through IT to the business.
* Transparent decision-making processes for development activities.
* Tracking value and reporting results.
All this can only be achieved if all the relevant knowledge and best practices are made available to the client - by ensuring the consulting companies themselves have a clearly defined and implemented BI governance policy in place within their BI competency that is then “sold” or made available to their various clients. This can only be done if an actual governance committee exists, that ensures the effectiveness and visibility throughout its own BI community.
Philosophy of BI
The purpose of the governance committee within a consultancy house is to ensure a BI philosophy is referenced through all BI implementation projects as far as possible, so BI knowledge is filtered down to the most junior consultants. Differences are reconciled with respect to architectures and designs, and most importantly, it ensures the clients know they get the best solution with backup of some of the most experienced designers and architects within the consulting house, as well as internationally.
The role of the governance committee is vital to the success of a BI strategy.
Rene Muiyser is principal consultant at PBT.
The internal governance committee should ideally be composed of senior consultants that cover all different types of technologies, including business analysts, modellers, senior developers and architects. This also needs to include several consultants to act as subject-matter experts on an as-needed basis. The most important thing to remember when forming the governance committee is that it must accurately reflect the entire base of enterprises where the consulting house might be involved.
The role of the governance committee is vital to the success of a BI strategy. The governance committee must therefore stay aligned with the consulting house's goals, but as an open forum. Each representative must be able to bring their individual specialty area's perspective and priorities to the table. Sharing those priorities will ensure redundancies and opportunities to combine efforts will become self-evident and will be the first step in determining which projects will add the most value to the consulting house.
In the beginning, the governance committee's focus would be on setting company-wide BI priorities, identifying BI impacts and opportunities, and identifying and providing mentoring to consultants for new and current projects. The main focus of such a BI governance committee is to provide greater visibility to all of the company's initiatives - aligning with overall business goals and providing value to each participating entity, and most important - to the clients.
The following will therefore be achieved by having BI governance within a consulting house:
* Strategy - smoothly running BI implementations. Ensuring the consultants and processes are enabled to complete a project successfully.
* Coaching - experts from the consulting house will teach other consultants how to get the most out of a BI solution, conveying best practices built on years of building and maintaining BI solutions for many clients.
* Resolution - experts will work with other consultants, clients and third parties to diagnose and resolve problems where assistance has been requested.
* Monitoring - oversee that BI projects and implementations have the best solution made available to the respective clients and that the consultants assigned have the best knowledge and assistance to their disposal.
As with any BI initiative, there are always the questions around costing and justification. How much time will it take from the consultants that need to be on the committee? How will interaction take place with the mentoring of junior consultants? Who is going to fulfil what role on the committee - especially as a consulting house has a very different staff complement than a conventional business? How will the work of the committee be evaluated - if not by the committee? Or how will the shareholders be equipped to evaluate the work of the committee?
These are complex issues to resolve, but the most important aspect to be recognised is that it should be seen as a long-term investment from a company perspective, both in intellectual capital and as the marketing potential to existing and perspective clients. And let's not forget the substantial benefit to the clients themselves.
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