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 secure.
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 instance, if your business units store sales data in different formats or collect it from various sources, it becomes challenging to analyze all data sets uniformly.
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” approach would involve sending the report on a 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:
- 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.
- Build new content: Based on your initial findings and the latest data that comes your way, create content similar in theme and applicability to the other data that’s already popular with your user community.
- 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?
- Declutter: Remember the vice words of Marie Kondo. An effective BI governance strategy is lean and streamlined. Remove unusable, low-quality, and outdated data that no longer aligns with current change management/business changes, and ensure overall business intelligence is accurate. Only keep the data that sparks joy in the organizational structure.
- 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, and technology.
- People: These include business users, managers, and developers who must collaborate to implement BI governance on existing processes.
- 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.
- 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: The BI analyst translates those demands and requirements into binary logic and defines where the relevant data should be sourced from.
- Data steward: The Data steward is responsible for sourcing the necessary data for the BI analyst to monitor the metrics established by the business owner effectively.
6 best practices for BI governance
1. Assess process diameter
Process diameter refers to the number of users and business units involved in a business process. For example, the procurement process is essential for various business units. That’s because supply chain issues dictate that manufacturing sustenance and cash flow maintenance are 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 a top-down fashion. However, for less critical processes where short-term deviations don’t impact the company’s long-term vision, shortcuts can be implemented, allowing only the BI analyst and the data steward to collaborate.
2. Recertify processes continuously
To ensure your BI governance strategy is moving in the right direction, you should constantly monitor and re-certify your BI governance framework. 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, companies 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 are customer satisfaction and customer churn.
3. Leverage BI governance tools
Once responsibilities are laid out, processed, and identified, and the metrics are established, you should pull in the data and compare the as-is scenario with the ideal scenario. An effective bi-governance strategy is dependent on the rapid and efficient consumption of data.
BI tools automatically extract sensitive data from various business units’ processes, standardize it, and present it 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 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 relies on basic data governance to ensure that each employee has access to the data for which they have clearance. 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 be constantly monitored and maintained so that when employees create reports, they provide accurate business intelligence.
6. Optimize BI resource optimization
Closely related to the concept of data set 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:
If you’re considering an investment in business intelligence software, we’ve prepared a data-driven list of BI vendors.
We can help you through your vendor selection process:
Find the Right Vendors- Practical_Guide_to_BI_Governance_White_Paper.pdf
- 3_Pillars_of_Effective_BI_Gov_2021.pdf
- The 6 Critical Components of a Strong Power BI Governance Plan (gocollectiv.com)
Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.
Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.
He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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