Analytics enables your team to make confident decisions with actionable data, improving the bottom line for the entire organization. BI and analytics have proven their business value with their multiple use cases. Powerful analytics can give enterprises a headstart in the race of digital transformation.
According to the 2018 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study, small organizations with less than 100 employees have the highest rate of BI penetration or adoption. However, most of the bigger organizations with more than 1000 employees have seen less than 40% penetration.
The adoption of BI has been successful for bigger organizations as well but at department-level or field level where it can be a real value add. These enterprises often struggle to rollout BI till the bottom-most level and hence, fail to transform into a data-driven organization.
Consider building a center of excellence
The reasons for the failure of enterprise-wide adoption of BI can include a lack of skills, standards, methodologies, or governance. Yet, the primary reason continues to be a failure of being able to prioritize the right use cases. Let’s dive into some of these challenges:
- Lack of skills across the organization
With a global shortage of talent in the analytics sector, it’s increasingly difficult for many enterprises to attract and retain data scientists. When an organization does employ these experts, they are often limited to one department and the entire organization doesn’t benefit. With global enterprises, things are further complicated as new skills require a cultural change across the organization. - Lack of standards, methodology, and governance
In most organizations, different departments and teams are working with different tools and that proves to be a challenge when it comes to implementing global solutions. Enterprises must define global standards for the tools. Furthermore, analytics teams must enforce policies to control and limit access to data while ensuring security. - Lack of use cases prioritization
Often, organizations plan their projects based on the big data architecture roadmap instead of the other way round. Projects should be planned based on the business impact, ensuring a business-oriented, value-driven approach is taken for the entire organization.
What is a surefire approach to implementing BI that delivers the promised ROI?
A center of excellence is the essential foundation before adopting BI. A CoE can give your organization the direction and insights it needs to maximize the business value from BI and analytics initiatives.
What center of excellence really means
The idea of building a CoE isn’t new to the American business community. IDC’s 2018 CIO Sentiment Survey found that 93% of respondents are already leveraging some form of CoE to address their analytics challenges and opportunities. Though these CoEs play an essential role, they are often not that big and don’t have the right resources. Given their nascent stage, they are unable to drive enterprise-wide impact.
The entire purpose of building a CoE is to lead the technological transformation and improve overall business outcomes through the organization’s products and processes. It cannot be siloed; it must be integrated into all product and process activities. The ultimate goal of a CoE is to imbue excellence everywhere.
Now that you have a good understanding of why you need a CoE and what it really means, let’s dive into the business benefits that it offers for your enterprise.
Accelerate BI and analytics adoption
A CoE can accelerate BI and analytics adoption by reducing the time to implement data-driven initiatives and embed intelligence. A center of excellence has the business understanding and technology expertise to drive adoption. With dedicated teams working on different kinds of initiatives, a CoE is equipped with the tactical knowledge to ensure best practices and methodologies are followed through every department and every step of the way. This way, CoEs make things happen faster and grow as the organization grows, keeping up with the business needs.
Facilitate enterprise-wide coordination
By pooling resources and bringing together experts, CoEs drive enterprise-wide collaboration. Analytics expertise isn’t often readily available and CoEs address that issue by creating a highly accessible network of experts that help out all departments and functions of the organization. The CoE connects the different experts and competency centers that might be otherwise distributed.
Reach a global scope
The CoE is rather indispensable when your goal is to reach a global scope. You might have some isolated learnings and successes but to truly scale, you need to build a center of excellence. Standardizing all aspects of enterprise data transformation and streamlining all business processes, it will propel business outcomes for the organization as a whole.
Transform from tactical to strategic
A center of excellence supports the IT front as well as the business front for the organization. It enables a transformation at the corporate-level instead of the department-level. It aligns business with technology, allowing you to be strategic instead of tactical. CoE improves decision-making and acts as a tool to maximize ROI on all initiatives.
Conclusion
Every business has hoards of data but how you leverage it builds your core competitive advantage. Leaders recognize that and are making strides to drive optimum business value from data. However, many of their initiatives are good for a particular department or function. To scale, standardize, and support such initiatives, a center of excellence is essential. A CoE can embed the necessary organizational and cultural changes at a corporate level.
Whether you are implementing BI for the very first time or extending your current system or migrating to a new one, Acuvate provides consulting to strategically execute Enterprise BI and Data Analytics and implement the defined roadmap. We can help you set up a BI and analytics CoE to enable your transformation to a data-driven enterprise. Please feel free to get in touch with our experts if we have any questions.
