BI Competency Centers – A Program Management approach towards delivering excelling BI

I recently came across a client whose need’s where genuinely overwhelmed by a bit of frustration and a lack of solution partners who are not just technology implementers. The company had consolidated a lot of software solutions from various vendors, with overlapping features and functionality and had multiple departments participating in a tug of war for taking their departmental (and individual) BI ventures, enterprise wide. Interestingly, there was the case of an orphaned BI initiative there as well, the sponsors of that project had gone elsewhere!

The company came up with the idea of an excellence center (or a competency center) to try to standardize people, processes and technology. Easier said than done, the whole concept IS highly Utopian and is usually touted as a single solution to this fairly universal problem. But to achieve this”excellence”, a lot of background work is required which besides being costly is also time consuming.

To start with, a vision of an excellence center has to be developed. First of all, what DO THESE TERMS REALLY MEAN? Excellence Centers, Competency Centers, Strategy and Delivery Groups etc.It is one of the curse of hypes but a fairly reasonable mapping exists……”Program Management”

A Business Intelligence Program Management which sees BI implementations not just as a technology with limited business benefits but a business initiated venture with a targeted growth plan providing further services, features, ROI and sanity has a very strong case to sell.

According to Gartner Research, “A BICC is a cross-functional team with specific tasks, roles, responsibilities, and processes for supporting and promoting the effective use of Business Intelligence across the organization.”

BI Projects should be looked as ongoing, cyclical and iterative BI processes providing an improved delivery at each iteration. A Competency Center can provide the framework for measuring BI projects and their implementation, it also lets the company experience the cultural and operational transformations taking place as a result of a systematic and pervasive BI establishment. However, considering the different organizational behavior at different sized companies, operating in various verticals in diverse cultural backgrounds cannot be a single, enlightening offering.

It has to be Tailored for each concern whether a corporate or a department. But in general, a few set of services are considered core to the BI concerns in a company, namely,

1. The Periodic Assessment of ROI and Cost vs Benefits.
2. The standardization of processes and technology, whcih includes an enterprise level integration infrastructure again for both business and technology.
3. A well defined and controlled Risk Management perspective on the BI space.
4. A carefully crafted Knowledge Management initiative including organizational change.
   
5. A focused and prioritized agenda on Business User “Buy-In” into the BI environment.

Several companies provide their BICC setup and operations competencies and consultancies these days.  However, there aren’t many best practices or guidelines in choosing the right partner for establishing one. Minimum requirements could be the ability of execute BI projects and programs, strong Human Resources, Business Processes and Systems Integration skills etc.

Although BICCs are ongoing programs, they should be highly target oriented. These milestones and performance targets are based on various assessment calculators which usually come as part of a BICC setup.

A very creative way to visualize the progress and understand the whole philosophy behind the BICCs is wonderful BI Maturity Model for demonstrating the characteristics of a BI program or project, developed by TDWI.

There is also a fairly detailed book on the topic of establishing and developing a BICC, published from SAS and Wiley and Co, Titled:

“Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage“ (Wiley and SAS Business Series) by Gloria J. Miller, Dagmar Brautigam, Stefanie V. Gerlach

Although the book is written by one of the BICC consultancy firms, the ideas presented are applicable universally. Their interpretation of the core services offered (or should be) by a BICC have been widely adopted by both the industry and the academia.

Source: Business Intelligence Competency Centers, a Team Approach to Maximize Competitive Advantage" SAS and Wiley Co.

All of these services are interrelated and each serves as an input to others. Each service also serves more than one goal of the BICC.

For example, the Advanced Analytics service besides providing a greater usability of BI and its infrastructure also increases the ROI. It also presents a strong case for evangelizing BI. It gives the business users an insight on what CAN happen from your BI environment. For organizations not having a sound infrastructure in place, an aggressively advertised advanced analytics service can form the motive to invest in a holistic enterprise information architecture, for example.

Establishing a BICC is a highly subjective matter and varies substantially from case to case. However a template based road map can be followed as one provided in the referred book. Primarily it depends on the existence of a similar setup already in the company, the maturity of the company in terms of its processes and policies for change management and technology, the type of people in terms of domain expertise and skill levels, the budget and time constraints etc.

As part of a general best practice, it is ideal to grow the BICC organically, meaning from bottom up with sponsorship from the top. A departmental wide BICC prototype which is planned for the enterprise but services one smaller concern at a time, like a department and then growing gradually into covering more departments and offering richer services.

Having a centric approach towards managing the concerns of BI is a daunting task but has its dividends promised if done well. The success of BI projects heavily rely on their continuity, reliability, flexibility, visibility and scalabiilty. BICCs offer just that.

Organizing Life 2.0 – A brief comparison

Jittering the Nitty Gritties, the mundane details, the crosses, the hashes, scrapping it and back to the drawing board. This is the usual activities of anyone taking notes and trying to bring structure to chaos. There are several theories and techniques out there to survive life 2.0 and many man hours have been spent by many men trying to figure out the system best for him. For all the sexists, let me be clear, I believe women are better organised and they can manage multiple tasks. But men, have to use one of the many available artificial systems to get back their control on life. I managed to prune down such systems to three, close to nature.

The ThinkingRock software supporting the GTD methodology, the FreeMind software supporting Mindmaps and MS OneNote supporting well…collaborative notes. TaskJuggler came as a close fourth on personal taste but I have the perception of it being too geeky for the general audience to catch the concept. All three of these software alongwith their methodologies have individual strengths and weaknesses and these are subjective based on interests, one’s educational and professional background and capabality of usage. although all three are pretty intuitive and takes no time to get going, there are several opposing communities of users whose preferences of their choices conflict with one another.

Here I will present to you my perspective of how I organise myself better or just perceive to be better organised!

1. FreeMind (Free):

Mindmaps were used by people as early as Aristotle as a way to represent things immediate to mind. Psychologists say that on average, our mind can keep 7+-2 concepts in mind at a particular time, sort of saying our cache can hold that much concepts. Some of us find ourself stressed out by the burden of having more than 9 items simultaneously which results in stress, incorrect judgement and inconsistent decisions. Mindmaps is a simple, intuitive way to organise concepts immediate in our minds in a tree-like structure whose depth can be controlled depending on our context. Here is a typical mindmap made in FreeMind, an opensource tool which provides many rich features than anyother commercial mindmapping tool out in the market.

2. Microsoft OneNote:

Microsoft introduced OneNote as part of their Office Suite since 2003 and while it gained popularity in Office 2007 onwards due to the tighter integration with Outlook and Word and also due to the licensing and distribution changes (now ships with standard Office Suite), it still remains to achieve a regular membership  of the Office family for years to come. The strong point of OneNote is its real time collaborative features which gives it a shared whiteboard feel which can accommodate most media types, text, images, video, audio, Office objects (visio shapes, excel sheets etc), handwriting (for Tablet PC) and a good flexibility for use the writing area like a physical scrap pad. What it lacks though is a systematic structure of representing information which can be good at some scenarios. Unlike FreeMind or ThinkingRock which are backed by particular knowledge representation schemes, OneNote is for the free souls to use as they please.

This approach suits many individually but cant be relied upon in team based project sharing and collaboration. Although OneNote pretends to present well organized templates, it actually does not do much more than enter default bulleted “flat” text.

3. ThinkingRock (Free)

This is a very well made software following the Getting Things Done GTD approach of David Allen whose main mantra is context. Our daily routines see different contexts which includes our location, our moods, our energy to do different type of work at different times of the day. This adds up to the philosophy as used in Mind maps as well that the less thoughts one can have at a particular time, the more creative and productive he/she can become.

ThinkingRock automatically hides all tasks and thoughts not in one’s current context and allows a self-adaptive task priority utility in which least prior activities after some time automatically become activities to complete ASAP. This would let one to eventually complete all tasks regardless of priority and not forget even the smaller things in life.

As a PIM (Perosnal Information Management) tool, ThinkingRock is a clear choice over the other two but as a single point of reference for managing thoughts, scraps, and time, OneNote and FreeMind can be used instead. For teams working on collaborative work, there is no comparision to the features offered by OneNote. In essence, to use the best of breed, one has to use atleast two of these products simultaneously until their intergration is developed. There is already some collaborative features available on FreeMind and the development is very active which is a sign of better things to come. This gives an edge to FreeMind over OneNote, while ThinkingRock can be used solely as a PIM.

Article++ (Putting your company’s whole brain to work – Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Straus)

The article under survey is the only article featured in the Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management written by women. And this gives the whole series a diverse insight into the broader topic especially when the two ladies attribute a very pertinent issue which every cross-functional and cross-domain team management faces: How to get everyone to work as a team?

The authors realize that different people have different ways to tackle the world and when people from these different spectra interact, there are problems which emerge due to the direct clashes involved. However, with careful observation, better understanding of these different ‘cognitive’ typed thinkers and actors within a group, one can devise a workable strategy to achieve the true promised potential of teams with diversity.

Some people are inherently more inclined towards analytical reasoning while others on intuitive reasoning. One rely heavily on data and numbers while others rely on soft matters and highly qualitative information to drive their decision making. And when proposals are presented to an audience comprising of both groups, there is a definite backlash in the making as a simple denial of a proposal ultimately leads to a personal attack unless the management is able to bring awareness and tolerance about the diverse point of views.

The authors go on to say that several groups rely on either of the two types of people in their teams and apparently these teams do good but only within their limited domain. As soon as innovation is demanded from such a group, the lack of having what they term as ‘whole brain’ people makes it a hinderance. Therefore, the foremost task of a knowedge manager within a diverse recipe team is to identify the proportions of left-brained and right-brained people in the team. The left-brained, more inclined towards the intuitive and more qualitiative line of reasoning while the right-brained more inclined towards hardcore facts and figures, more analytical and logical can present bias in the overall output of the team’s work but a proper mixture leads to the perfect blend required for innovation.

To ‘know’ the constituents of one’s team, a knowledge manager must have analytical understanding of the team’s composition for which charts such as the MBTI chart or the HBDI table are the chief tools in use. Having such a quantitative overview of the team’s cognitive content, the manager can then devise a strategic plan what the authors term as the ‘Creative Abrasion‘ which fine tunes the team towards an optimal communication scheme for innovative work.

The goal of this creative abrasion is to depersonalize conflict and provide an inner understanding of how the team operates as both individuals and as a team. According to them, usually an individual has a certain preference towards a line of reasoning while having an ability to do reasoning in another way much better. For instance, some people might be better equipped with making quantitative analytical reasoning but prefer intuitive reasoning for problem solving. A quantitative insight into the makeup of a team helps not just the team but the individuals as well. The authors end up by emphasizing how it is important for management developing an insight into the cognitive reasoning process of the team to be a part of this whole process just like all the others involved. This leads to a robust scheme otherwise further problems originate making the management the culprit.

Article++ (Building a learning organization – David Garvin)

The best place to find this article is at the ‘Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management’ series of articles published in 1990-1991. Interestingly, this article follows one on a similar theme by Ikujiro Nonaka which is quite contrary to what David Garvin suggests in this article.

While Nonaka focuses on implicit knowledge, cultural knowledge and the role of an enterprise wide motto to foster the knowledge creation and learning process, Garvin attributes standard processes and measurable indices to ‘calculate’ the learning process to be necessary for building a learning organization. He further critizes the approach by Nonaka that a system without a proper check and balance is difficult to introduce in place and later on manage to an extent that it becomes an inherent corporate culture.

Garvin suggests that a learning philosophy like that of Nonaka is quite abstract and ideal and lacks an operational plan to carry it out. He suggests an alternative model and provides his idea on how to develop SOP guidelines. to build a learning organization. But before presenting his idea, he stresses the need of defining a proper framework in place to develop our ideas such that various idea strategies can be comparable on some scale.

The Framework:

Garvin suggests a framework of 3M’s : Meaning, Management and Measurement. The idea being that since ‘learning’ is still an elusive concept and there is a lack of best practices to govern a learning organization and then finally there is no unified and quantifiable approach to measure any learning strategy, therefore, the foremost problem is not to bring forth these ideas but to develop a framework within which these ideas can be built and tested.

Garvin points out that an organization should set out first to define what ‘learning’ means to it, what are its goals of ‘learning’ and what outcome is expected from ‘learning’ . Once these different aspects are better understood, an organization can safely claim to have a clear ‘Meaning’ of a learning organization. After which a concrete SOP has to be implemented such that the learning process is standardized across teams and across people within the organization. This he terms as ‘Management’. Thirdly, there has to be some tools available to measure the outcome of the learning procedures such that the system can have a self diagnosis and can tune itself to the directions suggested by the measuring indexes. Thus, a ‘Measurement’ has to be clearly defined. Once these three things are in place, one can design an idea to build a learning organization.

The Idea:

After devising a framework, Garvin develops an idea within the 3M’s framework by defining learning as:

“A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.”

But having said that, he points out that without actions being associated with learning, there is no learning, that is, according to Garvin, learning is ‘learning by doing’ only and it also is the major instrument for employee motivation. If people see that their learned concepts/ideas/trade/skill are being practically implemented, then they feel motivated to further learn and improve. According to him, a learning management system must have a:

1. Systematic problem solving method which ensures consistency and quality. Such a system is data driven and scientific.
2. Experimentation by either ongoing programs which provide incremental knowledge gains or by demonstrations or prototypes which provide a holistic update to the knowledge creating process.
3. Learning from past experience enables one to stop repeating mistakes through lessons learned and develop a best practices knowledge base to improve work. With such a system in place, a failure becomes a productive failure as it brings insight into the product or process.
4. Learning from others like the ‘not invented here syndrome’ or the SIS idea (Steal Ideas Shamelessly).
5. Transferring knowledge through flatter organizational structure, corporate knowledge repositories and by placing a smartly designed incentive system.

Among measuring schemes, conventional methods like ‘learning curves’ and ‘manufacturing progress functions’ have their shortcomings thus Garvin suggests using the ‘half-life curve’ as a suitable tool to measure a learning strategy.

Finally he discusses the high level process of building a learning organization which starts from a cognitive phase where new ideas are exposed and are digested by the people followed by a behavioral phase where these ideas are put to use and finally a process improvement phase which alters behavior to improve any KPI, quality, or efficiency. And the start of these processes is triggered only by the creation of a learning environment.

Article++ (Teaching smart people how to learn – Chris Argyris)

Chris Argyris brings forward a very useful article which I believe to be one of the best articles I’ve read on the subject not just because it gives some new phrases like ’single loop’ or “double loop” but because the insight he delivers is very realistic and personally, I found considerable improvement in my practical experiences.

What is Learning? How to learn? Argyris does not start off by forwarding his doctrine on these questions but rather focuses on human behavior and our learning patterns. On an empirical justification, he points out that learning is the process of solving problems out of one’s comfort zones of presuppositions and beliefs. According to him, failure is an important anecdote to better learning in the sense that those who have never failed, have never seen an uncomfortable or unforeseeable situation and are not equipped to handle under distress. Another reason for people failing to learn beyond their routine tasks (termed single loop learning) is the difference between their perceived behavior and their actual behavior. By nature, humans tend to blame the environment and contradict themselves when the perceived and the actual don’t match.

Argyris then explains why people avoid learning (double loop) and attributes the fear of failure and over ambitious goals to be the reason. People never set average standards, they set the best landmark to achieve and often fail to achieve them. Yet subconsciously, people deny these failures to their own setting of high standards but rather to the external environment. The fear of failure stops people from adventuring outside their comfort zones and into self analysis which hurts the ego.

This thesis is very well backed up by empirical human psychology and provides some tips to avoid locking oneself up into a single loop learning situation. In Statistical Learning Theory, we call a learning model is over fit (and hence, not acceptable) if it becomes too hard lined on its belief based on past knowledge. A flexible learning model, one that has not ‘converged’ and stuck in a local loop is sought after.

Article++ (The knowledge-creating company – Ikujiro Nonaka)

Japanese Management is well known for its exotic uniqueness to bring about success in organizations. Many of the common principles in Japanese Management appear alien to roughly speaking the Western school of Management. In the context of Knowledge Management, there are several new ideas based on demographic traditions besides other factors in the Orient. Nonaka starts off this article by focusing on the importance of leveraging tacit knowledge. There is a strong emphasis on corporate knowledge culture and the presence of an enterprise knowledge embedded in its human resource.

However, such a philosophy to harness tacit knowledge from employees is a far greater concept to implement keeping in mind the inherent challenge to explicitize it. However, Nonaka together with Takeuchi visualized such a process known as ‘The Spiral of Knowledge’ or the SECI Model.

In this article, Nonaka further reinforces the spiral model of knowledge flow and an important question which arises in the context of a knowledge creating organization is what defines knowledge creation? And where does knowledge originate from?

According to Nonaka, ‘new knowledge begins from chaos’, and chaos here is further elaborated to be a controlled tool by senior management to invoke the thought process within employees ‘against’ an ambiguous or vague corporate metaphor. According to him, an organization should float around a metaphor which defines a motto for the organization but at the same time signals a vague or ambiguous concept which encourages employees to think about the overall process and try to make meaning out of it. He explains that any corporate motto holds a specific and different meaning for each employee due to the different functional contexts of the worker. And this differing meanings brings the essence of debate and questioning which ultimately leads to a creative process. Nonaka strengthens this hypothesis by quoting several examples from notable organizations which employed similar tactics and were successful in creating not just new knowledge but improving creativity of their employees. More specifically, knowledge creation for Nonaka is the transfer of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge by utilization of tacit knowledge into an innovating process.

Besides metaphors, Nonaka also advocates the use of analogies if an organization finds metaphors to be more confusing for her employees. In his words, “An analogy is an intermediate step between pure imagination and logical thinking”. Sometimes these analogies are an evolved form of a metaphor, further fine tuned into more standardized, less context sensitive meaning and thus abstracts the tacit knowledge which the SECI model termed as ‘Conceptualization’. Organizations which have a fairly well defined and successful analogy in place lead the way to a model which represents the tacit knowledge of an organization in place.

One notable difference between Nonaka’s theme to that of Drucker’s is redundancy. Where Drucker feels that redundancy is a mere burden and a bottleneck and is usually a byproduct of too many layers of middle management, Nonaka finds redundancy to be a chief component to harness tacit knowledge from internalization through to conceptualization if visualized in his Spiral Knowledge Model.

Redundancy brings organizations to experience a concept in different contexts and by different functional teams. Thus a holistic view of the concept is created. Although redundancy does not have to be the way Drucker or others despise it, it creates a “common cognitive ground”. Such redundancy can be created by frequent job rotation or by common access to corporate knowledge base where the job of knowledge creation is not confined to particular teams or individuals but is everyone’s responsibility. However, according to Nonaka, this does not mean that there are no specific job roles within a knowledge creating company, but knowledge creation is not confined at a single locaiton.

Bottom line is that knowledge management is all about managing tacit knowledge and communicating it across the enterprise in an endless repetitive cycle.

Article++ (The coming of the new organization – Peter Drucker)

This article is a fantastic tool to boost the emerging KM trade industry for especially those in the developing world who stand against bureaucracy by enlightening them of the necessary changes required to not just sustain 21st century business pressures but to lean forward towards an innovating organisation. Peter Drucker is a household name among old school managers besides the younger lot and when he points out the changing landscape of business organizational setups, demands and behavior, these old timers just have to listen.

Drucker associates the coming of the new organization with the advent of data processing technologies available, which although are not a prerequisit for an information based organizaion but without it, a setup can heavily risk drowing into a ’swamp’ of data. How data processing tools have transformed an act of diagnosis into anaylsis bridges a huge gap between innovation and business operations. Such organizations which foster information turns every business issue into an opportunity, risks are precalculated and business decision success rates soar up.

But with the cavear comes the catch for any organization to parallel itelf as an information based organizaion. Organigrams have to be redesigned, with very little middle management layers, flatter structures and a shift of knowledge from upper echolons to front line workers who are also transformed from mere human hands to knowledge workers capable of working in cross-functional and sometimes cross-domain teams.

The way Drucker outrightly insults the existence of middle management pointing out that it merely plays a role of information relay which by the advent of better technology and better awareness of frontline workers is no longer required, sends out a very strong signal that (middle) management infact becomes inefficient if not a bottleneck.

This also brings about massive change in mindsets of people and their careers. In the coming of the new organization, where specialists are catered, there will be far fewer opportunities to jump to ‘management’ simply because of the lack of a substantial middle management layer. Secondly, in a knowledge intensive society, progress is deemed not by the promotion to management but by the specialization of knowledge and knowledge-based achievements within one’s domain.

Organigrams will also have time driven variations by the introduction of task forces instead of dedicated but sparsely connected departments and divisions. These task forces will be formed by a variation of domains, specializations and functions. Teams will be highly communicative and will participate in the entire lifecycle of an operation as compared to the traditional approach where one domain specialists/functional department becomes a major stakeholder at a particular timestamp in the operation’s lifecycle. These temporary task forces improves the organization’s cost efficiency and encourage the organization to carry out more frequent task forces which points towards an innovation friendly organization.

The bottom line that when workers start taking the bigger picture in mind by abstraction and secondly figure out the information flow between units, they take the track towards an information based setup. Such information flows exist between superiors and subordinates but according to Drucker, most of the information flow will happen within colleagues and vertical functions thus enabling greater abstraction and holistic view for these knowledge workers.