Should BI reside in IT or Business?

One of the most interesting questions that comes up in the BI areas is - should BI teams reside on the IT side or the Business side? Which means, should BI be under the CIO or the CFO? Of course, more and more we are seeing the CIO themselves now reporting to the CFOs.

I saw this question on the Linked in discussions.

The answers were diverse. They included:

• "....they should reside with PMO or STrategy departments"
• "...BI should be independent of IT and Business. However, there should be only one BI division catering to the various divisions in the organization. BI team should primarily focus on Business and leverage the existing technology to meet the business needs"
• "BI team should be on the business side"
• "The key word is collaboration. IT should be in always work closely with the Business to define their needs and to make it happen. The customer is the Business; however the driver of the technology should be IT."
• "It's my belief that BI teams exist as a conduit that bridges the gap between IT and the business"
• " My experience has been that it can be a rarity to find a good BI architect with good technical skills matched with the business acumen and process knowledge that can develop BI into something that is meaningful that helps drive the business."

This kind of dilemma occurs because though the strategic side of BI is very business / strategy oriented, the technology is a very important part of it all. After all, BI is as much about the Data as it is about the strategy. If you create the best strategy in the world, but get garbage as data, then you might as well have not spent your time and dollars on a grand strategy! Data is more about IT than business.

I have seen companies totally disregard the importance of data governance and integrity when it comes to evaluating the BI/EPM systems. The business usually goes for the "user friendliness" - which can land them in the soup later as the user friendly application and datawarehouse architecture may be sub optimal from data standpoint.

Oracle is one case in the point. If you are an SAP shop, then you would shoot yourself in your foot if you go for Hyperion as the EPM (planning and budgeting) solution. As their BI strategy - specifically for SAP clients - is almost non-existent. Hyperion uses Essbase as the DW, but that is NOT the DW of their BI solution which uses the reporting capabilities of OBIEE (equivalent of BOBJ in the SAP world). The BI platform and DW of Oracle doesn't have a good connector for SAP's transaction platform (ECC6).

At one of my client, the business users were blown away by the planning and budgeting solution from Hyperion, even I was. But when one queried on the total landscape and integration, things fell flat for the Oracle folks!

Comments

[Business Intelligence Solution]

I appreciate that IT can able to take Business Intelligence Strategy. However It depends on the IT Companies. How much its growth of the company and how must annual profit of the Company. These terms is very useful for IT Company.

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