Business Intelligence Competency Center

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A Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is a cross-functional organizational team with defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for supporting and promoting the effective use of Business Intelligence (BI) across an organization.^[1]

Since 2001, the BICC concept has been refined through practical implementations in organizations that have implemented BI and related analytical software.

In practice, the term "BICC" is not well integrated into business or public sector organizations and there are a large variations in the organizational design for BICCs. Nevertheless, the popularity of the BICC concept has resulted in the creation of units within organizations that focus on the use of BI software for decision-making, thereby increasing that organizations return on investment (ROI) of BI.^[2]

A BICC coordinates the activities and resources to ensure that a fact-based approach to decision making is systematically implemented throughout an organization. It has responsibility for the governance structure for BI and the use of analytical programs, projects, practices, software, and architecture. The BICC is responsible for building the plans, priorities, infrastructure, and competencies that the organization needs to take forward-looking strategic decisions by using the BI and analytical software capabilities.

A BICC’s influence works within a typical business unit, playing a central role in the organizational change and strategic process decision of that unit. Accordingly, the BICC’s overarching purpose will aim to empower an entire organization to coordinate BI from all units. It will similarly ensure that information and best practices are communicated and shared through the entire organization for overall benefit from successes and lessons learned."^[3]

The BICC can also play an important organizational role, facilitating interaction among various cultures and units within the organization. Knowledge transfer, enhancement of analytic skills, coaching and training are central to the mandate of the BICC. A BICC should be pivotal in ensuring a high degree of information consumption and a ROI for BI.

Business Intelligence Competency Centers in U.S. Healthcare

Next to the U.S. government, the American healthcare industry generates the second largest amount of information every year. However, despite having complex information management needs, a KLAS report revealed that one-third of healthcare organizations do not have the appropriate business intelligence tools.^[4]

Many finance and energy industry companies have successfully implemented BICCs; these centers have produced financial returns on investment and accelerated decision-making speed. With these as examples, the healthcare industry has begun the use of BICCs.^[5] This is not without it challenges - creating a business intelligence competency center in healthcare involves prioritizing information needs, creating data governance structures, identifying data stewards to provide data quality assurance, establishing ongoing education programs, and defining predictive modeling, analytics, data warehouse, and cloud storage tools.^[6]

Skills Needed

Information technology specialists in structured query language (SQL) design, operation of relational databases, programming, reporting software, and analytics can provide the necessary technical information management skills for successful implementation of BICCs. Data stewards, such as data analysts and scientists, are also needed - they understand the creation, capture, storage, and access processes needed to ensure high quality data for the BICC to work optimally.^[7]

In recent years knowledge-oriented shared service centers have emerged in many organizations. Their primary focus has been the offering of analytics and data mining as an internal service across the organization .^[8] These centres are often referred to as Analytics Competency Center (ACC), or Analytics Center of Excellence; Analytics Service Center; Big Data CoC; or Big Data Lab.

By the end of 2017 it is observed that approximately 25% of all large firms have a dedicated ACC unit (or equivalent) for data and analytics.^[9] In contrast to classic BICC these centers do not place emphasis on reporting, historical analysis and dashboards. ACCs follow the strategic objective of transforming a company towards a data focus, building expertise in data analytics, formulating a data strategy, identifying use cases for data mining, and drive the general adoption of analytics across the organization.^[10] BICCs may be transformed into an ACC, but new formations of ACC can also be found in practice.