Business Analytics for Managers, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7Structuring of a Business Analytics Competency Center

In Chapter 6, we looked at the business's creation of source data and thus completed our presentation of the business analytics (BA) model from Chapter 1. In this chapter, we discuss how the activities of the BA model can be carried out via a BA competency center (BACC).

The trend today is that more and more analytical competence centers are created. They work independently from or control the Business Intelligence division, which in turn typically only works with maintaining the data warehouse and provisioning user front ends. As a result, the big shift is that it is the analytical department which leads the way, not the data warehouse teams.

Another concern today is the lack of skilled analysts. A quote from McKinsey's Big Data Report from June 2011 claims: “The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings.”

The answers to this lack of skilled analysts have come from three directions: more advanced and easy‐to‐use self‐service systems, outsourcing of the analytical function, and development of the analytical factories.

We already have covered the new trends within self‐service systems in Chapter 5, where market leading companies today produce systems that a user can simply talk to or write to in natural language. These self‐service systems also give the ...