challenges
Business intelligence and performance management solutions are nowadays present in most companies. From our practical experience however, business intelligence solutions in the past used to be mainly driven by IT, while CPM approaches have been confined to the business departments, with choices made independently from the corporate IT standards.
Same is applicable to business intelligence alone, where many companies have departmental BI solutions not aligned with standards, limiting the added value of BI, and leading to overlapping solutions not delivering a single version of the truth. This observable fact is merely linked to the somewhat chaotic or organic growth of business intelligence within companies in the past decades.
Companies now have to manage the inheritance from the past and take into account new challenges:
- rationalization of processes: rationalizing the processes of business intelligence and performance management is utmost important in rationalizing the architecture of BI within the organization. Defining how BI will be considered, taking into account the organization of BI within the company and how business and IT work together is a key step forward here.
- rationalization of technologies: next to processes and organization, managing the inheritance from the past often means managing multiple overlapping technologies and leads to high maintenance costs. These costs can be decreased through rationalization and standardization of business intelligence and performance management within the company.
- technological market consolidation: the lines between business intelligence and CPM solutions are gradually blurring, leading to one new class of applications under the umbrella of performance management. The consolidation of technologies requires stronger than ever partnerships between business and IT departments, knowing that each party keeps focusing on its own specialization.
Keyrus answer
The technological market is changing and will change even more drastically in the coming years. To avoid a new potential nightmare of even more silo solutions for business intelligence or performance management, the creation of adequate teams to develop and ensure the continuity of performance management is required.
Keyrus recommends the set-up of multidisciplinary teams, which brings together all required skills into a Business Intelligence Competence Centre (BICC) or Performance Management Competence Centre (PMCC), which will be responsible for:
