JK's Diary

Focus on the concept. Not the name

Let me start with BICC and BI CoE. From what I have read till now in articles and books like “Business Intelligence for Dummies”, there is hardly any difference between the two. However, if there is a choice they prefer CoE over Competency Center. The reason quoted in the book “Business Intelligence for Dummies” By Swain Scheps is, the word “competence” has the connotation of bare minimum proficiency, giving the feeling of being damned by faint praise. Even though BICC will go well beyond mere proficiency, it sounds mere average.

Based on what I have been seeing till now, I would say there is more than a fine line of difference between BICC and BI COE. According to me, BI COE can be considered as a subset of BICC. While one can have a number of COEs each concentrating on a particular area like say, Data, Tools & Technology, process, etc. BICC is something that houses all these BI COEs under one single umbrella and manages them.

To bring in more clarity, these CoEs will manage the resources, define standards & processes and best practices within the scope of that CoE. Any framework or approach or methodology set up for monitoring the overall progress of these CoEs including shared assets, processes and technology will be performed by the BICC.

Now to create some controversy/initiate discussion here, lets bring in data governance (DG). Organizations either implement BICC or DG but not both. On a closer look, you will see that, these organizations that claim to implement DG and not BICC, over a period have actually expanded into what otherwise would have been done as part of a BICC initiative. As shown in the picture below, they started off with “Data” governance as the primary goal (Represented as point 1). Once the base was set, they realized that changes to other areas like infrastructure, tools, etc was needed and started to enter into that space and control them (Represented as point 2).

As you can see, point 3 is represented in dotted lines because it is not mandatory for the DG team to setup separate CoEs in this model. It’s a single, strong, core team (dedicated in some cases) that could have gone ahead and performed the job of various CoEs during the setup without actually setting up the CoE. In other cases, they would have setup small teams like one for technology as a whole and so on to quicken the process of implementation.

So to summarize, for me its something like this BICC > BI COE > Data Governance.
I am open to all kinds of feedback as I know I can be wrong. So please share your views on this topic.

Reference:
“Business Intelligence for Dummies” By Swain Scheps
http://www.executionmih.com/business-intelligence/competency-centre-competencies.php