BI Governance: 6 Implementation Best Practices

The global business intelligence market is projected to be $33.3B by 2025, with more business units adopting BI tools. The importance of business intelligence is increasing. Data-driven decision making, for instance, is five times faster via data access and data analytics.

However, data quality in BI strategy is paramount if companies want to use it to reach their strategic goals. BI governance, or business intelligence governance, is the set of ground rules that ensure the data used across different business units is of high quality, fresh, applicable, and secured.

In this article, we will explain BI governance in more detail, and introduce you to 5 best practices when rolling out your BI governance framework.

What is BI governance?

BI governance is a business-wide strategy of how business intelligence data is gained, used, analyzed, accessed, and stored. For example, if your business units store their sales data differently from one another, or collect it from different data sources, it’d be difficult to analyze all data sets in the same way.

Or imagine you are sharing financial performance data with the shareholders. An “ungoverned” approach would be to send it sporadically, using a different set of metrics each quarter. A “governed” way would be send the report on specific day of each quarter, in a standardized format, using a dedicated financial or reporting solution.

What are the steps in BI governance?

BI governance is roughly made up of 5 sub-processes:

1. Data usage monitoring: To run an effective BI governance, business users’ data usage should be measured and monitored. This helps the BI development team to identify and categorize data based on usage.
2. Build new content: Based on your initial findings and the new data that comes your way, create content similar in theme and applicability to the other data that’s already popular with your user community.
3. Measure data performance: To optimize your BI implementation, you should constantly measure how well your BI strategy is working in action with KPIs. Is it increasing user productivity? Is it receiving engagement? Is it making employees’ lives easier? How are the various business units reacting to it? etc.
4. Declutter: Remember the vice words of Marie Kondo. An effective BI governance strategy is lean and streamlined. Get rid of unusable data, low-quality data, data that no longer corresponds to the current change management/business changes and overall business intelligence. Only keep the data that sparks joy into the organizational structure.

5. Manage governance committee: Monitor the governance committee to ensure that your project management teams are constantly carrying out the previous four steps.

What are the three pillars of BI governance?

BI governance is built on three pillars: people, process, technology.

1. People: People are all business users, managers, and developers who must work together to implement BI governance on existing processes.
2. Process: Each to-be-rolled-out process should be mapped out and agreed upon by the people. Tools such as process mining are useful in BI development.
3. Technology: Once people have agreed on implementing a BI governance framework, and have chosen the suitable processes, they can use a BI solution to create a well governed BI environment.

What is a BI team?

A BI team is composed of “people” who develop and implement the BI governance initiatives. Those people are:

• Business owner: The business owner envisions how things should be done, what metrics should be monitored, and what business rules should be enforced.
• BI analyst: BI analyst translates those demands and requirements into binary logic and defines from where the relevant data should be sourced from.
• Data steward: Data steward is tasked with sourcing the right data that the BI analyst needs to do their job, which is monitoring the metrics the business owner has laid out.

6 best practices for BI governance

1. Assess process diameter

Process diameter refers to how many users a business process involves, and how many business units it impacts. For example, the procurement process is important for various business units. That’s because supply chain issues dictate that manufacturing sustenance and cash flow maintenance is dependent on a consistent procurement process.

To certify and mandate such a business process that has a high audience and high business impact, the BI team should work in top-down fashion. But for less critical processes, whose short term deviations don’t affect the long term vision of the company, shortcuts can be made where only the BI analyst and the data steward collaborate.

2. Recertify processes continuously

To ensure that your BI governance strategy is moving in the right direction, you should be monitoring and re-certifying your BI governance framework constantly. For example, you should ask the project management teams if they are still using the correct metrics when assessing business performance.

For instance, businesses follow a boom-bust cycle. In expansionary times, such as 2015-2019, businesses should focus more on expanding their operations and expediting their growth. So when the analysts create reports, the customer list is a metric for growth.

But in down times, very few companies expand. So instead of serving more customers, they focus on serving their existing customers the best. So the metrics to focus on is customer satisfaction and customer churn.

3. Leverage BI governance tools

Once responsibilities are laid out, processed, identified, and the metrics established, you should pull in the data and compare the as-is scenario vs. the ideal scenario. An effective bi governance strategy is dependent on fast and easy consumption of data.

BI tools automatically extract the sensitive data from different business units’ processes, standardize them, and present them in a digestible manner on visible dashboards.

For example, you’d want to certify that each time a customer complaint was registered on the system, a representative reached out to them in the first 24 hours. The bots in the solution architecture would check the event logs data and extract the useful information. They then would put it in a report. And send it to the authorized personnel.

4. Maintain data governance strategy

A well governed BI environment is dependent on basic data governance to ensure each employee has access to the kind of data they have clearance for. So not only does data governance ensure data security, but it also increases transparency as the employees will have access to all the data relevant to them.

Most BI tools today have an optimized search function where business users can quickly search for something relevant to their business unit – this is also known as self service BI. Moreover, if data is restricted to them, they can request access and wait for a response.

5. Certify data sets

An effective BI strategy dictates that data sets are continuously certified so the user community knows they can trust the data at their disposal. Data quality and data integrity should constantly be monitored and maintained so when the employees create reports, it’d be an accurate piece of business intelligence.

6. Optimize BI resource optimization

Closely related to the concept of data sets certification, is BI resource optimization. Business intelligence strives for streamlined access to data, and so all data that is outdated, duplicate, irrelevant, or not useful should be taken out of circulation.

BI governance solutions can automatically scan the data dictionary, monitor data usage, user engagement, and assess its quality to put irrelevant data down the pecking order as a search engine would. Better content management results in less frustrated bi users and expedites ROI realization. That’s because the company will reach its BI maturity goal faster.

For more on business intelligence

If you are interested in learning more about business intelligence, read:

• How to Pair Data Mining & Business Intelligence?

And if you want to invest in business intelligence software, we have a data-driven list of BI vendors prepared.

We can help you through your vendor selection process:

Sources

1. Practical_Guide_to_BI_Governance_White_Paper.pdf
2. 3_Pillars_of_Effective_BI_Gov_2021.pdf
3. The 6 Critical Components of a Strong Power BI Governance Plan (gocollectiv.com)