Structuring BI Leadership from the Top

Aligning your BI program with corporate strategy and diverse, non-static business and IT requirements

Good governance doesn’t just happen. It must be planned and systematically implemented. Baseline’s Business Intelligence (BI) Governance service provides a customized framework to help senior managers design and implement the four main components of good BI governance – guiding principles, decision-making bodies, decision areas, and oversight mechanisms – to fit your company’s unique needs and culture.

Rather than starting at the bottom with data management tools or project management tasks, Baseline focuses on building the BI Governance mindset from the top. Our BI Governance best practices enable change leadership to break down organizational silos, reduce rework, shorten development cycles, and establish consistent processes.

Baseline’s BI Governance service provides you the tools to answer the four distinct questions surrounding every BI program:

• What decisions need to be made?
• Who will make those decisions?
• How will the decisions be made?
• How will the decisions be monitored?

» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline

Your Challenges

• Clearly defined authority and accountability, roles and responsibilities.
• Program planning, prioritization, and funding processes.
• Communicating strategic business opportunities to IT.
• Transparent decision-making processes for development activities.
• Tracking value and reporting results

» Back to top of page

The Problem

BI needs and complexity grow, investment escalates, but dissatisfaction continues

With ever-increasing levels of IT investment and demands to balance technology standardization and business flexibility, IT governance has emerged as a fundamental business imperative in today’s corporations. BI Governance, as a microcosm of the larger IT domain, is a logical outgrowth of this emphasis on IT governance.

The BI environment presents unique challenges that are particularly conducive to governance decision-making and oversight. It is multi-purpose. It serves many business functions, a variety of interests, and a plethora of needs. It is not static.

BI users operate in a world of discovery and learning where their needs become more sophisticated as skills and knowledge mature. The business direction changes and users alter their requirements. BI systems, tools, and people are likewise in a constant state of flux. The investment in terms of time, resources, and dollars is huge and the corresponding expectation for generating value is high.

Amidst this backdrop of change, complexity, and risk, surveys of data warehouse professionals indicate continuing dissatisfaction with the progress of business intelligence and data warehouse implementations. Concerns include lack of user adoption, failure to resolve data quality problems, low executive awareness, limited long range planning, and few penalties for non-achievement of project milestones or projected business value.

BI Governance Views Corporate Big Picture

» Back to top of page

The Baseline Approach

A customized framework for BI guiding principles, decision-making, and oversight

Baseline leads the BI Governance engagement from the viewpoint of senior managers who will be asked to endorse, invest, and engage in the governance process. Baseline uses its best practices BI Governance Framework to help senior managers focus on how BI governance impacts corporate leadership, improves processes, and generates tangible value.

We begin the engagement with a readiness assessment. Then we work with your BI Governance team to define an implementation plan tailored to your company for the four components of good governance – guiding principles, decision-making bodies, decision areas and decision rights, and governance oversight mechanisms. The engagement concludes with developing a set of governance tools that you can use going forward. As business leaders work through the steps of the framework, they build consensus on the need for BI Governance, adapt the concepts to their unique business needs and culture, and develop a sense of ownership and commitment.

BI Governance Framework

» Back to top of page

Your Value

Decision-making structures to prioritize investments and manage for results

Good BI Governance means significant benefits for your company in meeting corporate objectives:

Generating greater ROI.
Studies show that companies with good governance processes generate returns on their IT investments up to 40% greater than their competitors. Governance can optimize expenditures and monitor effectiveness. It reduces rework and cuts development cycle time. It provides economies of scale by sharing and reusing resources.

Better solutions through collaboration.
BI Governance balances business needs for innovation and responsiveness with IT requirements for standardization and efficiency. With good governance, the business and IT value models become virtually inseparable.

Establishing consistent and transparent processes.
A goal of BI Governance is clearly defining how work gets done and measured. Stakeholders understand the process, how to communicate their needs and issues, and what the results are.

» Back to top of page

Why Baseline

Practical techniques from lessons learned balance business and IT needs

Baseline designs BI Governance around a simple but comprehensive framework that incorporates the following lessons learned:

• BI Governance encompasses more than policies, rules, and standards. It also considers the behavioral side of decision-making – relationships, attitudes, and learning.
• BI Governance cannot be defined by organization or hierarchy alone. It blends people and functions from across the corporation into a dynamic and interconnected team based on common goals and collaboration.
• BI Governance needs to be actively designed to build commitment, cement working relationships, and think through decision-making scenarios.
• BI Governance design reflects a top down view of enterprise needs – linking strategy, process, information management, and IT. This ensures executive sponsorship and maintains the right decision-making focus at the appropriate management level.
• BI Governance is about leadership and change management. It takes vision, requires clear communications, manages expectations, and demands accountability.

» Back to top of page