CFO and COO support key to Agile Business Intelligence deployments

Speaking at the recent Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Summit in Sydney, Gartner analyst, James Richardson, said that organizations had to gain the support of their CFO and COO, not just the CIO, to successfully achieve an Agile BI deployment.

“Most plans for BICCs [Business Intelligence Competency Centers] are being reported to CIOs, but if this is going to survive, the CFO has to be the next place to go, with 20 per cent of centers being initiated by the CFO,” he said.

However, Richardson went on to say that, despite these findings, additional managerial support was needed because: “CFOs only care about reporting numbers, they aren’t going to help BI from a functional point of view.”

“We do see a lot of organizations where the business head is in charge of the centre as a whole,” he said. “... but the general path [for approval of BICC projects] is CIO to CFO and to the COO over time.”

IT and business collaboration crucial to achieve Agile BI

Richardson said that the success of Agile BI projects depended to a large extent on the ability to close the gap between the business and IT portions of the organization, and that securing executive backing from across different business functions aided the process.

“Business people and developers must work together to make sure the gap between IT and the business is reduced,” he said.

Richardson also explained that business and IT needed to collaborate closely to construct an environment conducive to an Agile BI implementation, because the agile methodology states that reporting needs are constantly changing, and this state of constant change must be embraced.

“BI is the art of trying to hit a moving target,” he said. “About half of BI requirements change in the first year of a BI project.”

Conclusion: Ask how Yellowfin can help you achieve an Agile BI rollout

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The paper discuses the ability of an Agile BI rollout to respond to changing data analysis and reporting needs, and provide vital insights into an organizations’ operational environment in shorter timeframes, with less complexity.

The paper breaks the concept of Agile BI into three equally important sections:

• Technology: The actual BI application and its capabilities and capacity to underpin agile development
• Culture: Creating a supportive business environment for the introduction of and ongoing support of a BI solution
• Process: The way in which a BI solution is deployed and implemented to meet the specific needs of an organization

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