Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage

Chapter 8. Infrastructure

Overview

A Business Intelligence infrastructure needs to satisfy each business area's need for information of varying complexity and allow for a timely delivery up to near–real time if necessary. Therefore, on a high level, the key features of a BI infrastructure must:

• Support a diverse user audience with varying levels of skills and preferred information channels

• Enable all business users to obtain relevant information, from simple reporting to advanced analytics

• Allow for information to be available in the shortest possible time frame

• Allow for the BI strategy to grow and develop

• Support the use of information for decision making

Must these features be met before a BICC can be established? No.

It is important to emphasize that a BI infrastructure as just outlined should not be seen as a precondition for implementing a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). In practice, the BICC will be instrumental in defining the future BI strategy for an organization and play an important role in the implementation or improvement of a BI infrastructure, at departmental and at enterprise level.

Depending on your current situation and on your overall strategy for the BICC, your selection criteria might equate only to a subset of the criteria for an enterprise BI infrastructure listed above: The key point is to plan for future growth and to strive to avoid creating insular solutions with no integration at all. The ideal BI infrastructure must allow for such a growth path: ...