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Build a business intelligence team to optimize data use
Leaders who want to protect data investments must build a strategic business intelligence team with five core roles: the expert, architect, designer, analyst and data steward.
Maximizing the value from business intelligence technology starts with building the right BI team.
BI emerged from the need to dig deeper into the numbers in operational and management reports. A standard report presents business data in a fixed format, reflecting what is important to a developer or IT team. However, these reports don't enable data exploration, as they only represent one hypothesis of what matters and how to approach it. BI gives organizations a way to examine those hypotheses and find new answers to evolving questions.
Whether building a BI team from scratch or reorganizing an existing, but loosely defined one, leaders must define the team's relationship to the rest of the organization from the outset. The more complex and common scenario arises when BI roles already exist and need consolidation.
Why an organization needs a BI team
Nearly all organizations maintain some level of operational and management reporting. Most employ some form of analytics, frequently using spreadsheets as an entry-level tool. However, it's common to find departments that lack a formal analytics capability. Building a BI team is a chance to gain these skills and strengthen the company's competitive edge.
As data generation accelerates, users across the enterprise have adopted self-service BI technologies. Different business units might have independently adopted different tools to produce insights. Although software vendors often promote a "land-and-expand" approach, many companies don't always follow through on expansion. While this might be tactically effective for each department, it rarely leads to a cohesive strategy.
Key roles in the BI team
Before deciding on the structural details -- such as a virtual team with personnel distributed across several departments or a new formal unit -- consider the team's functional design. Five roles are critical to BI team success, and any effective team incorporates these responsibilities in some way. It's common for one individual to wear several hats. If that's the case, make sure they don't feel overstretched or unsupported.
The subject matter expert
Someone on the team must have an excellent understanding of the business and how it relates to current IT processes and applications. This subject matter expert helps develop the BI strategy and acts as a liaison between the BI team and stakeholders. This expertise typically comes from one of two sources:
- A business specialist who has learned the infrastructure and the data architecture.
- An IT specialist working in data management, who has been in their role long enough to deeply understand the business.
Because this role is stressful and demanding, knowledge sharing is critical to the BI strategy. Common job titles for this position include BI manager, BI director or VP of BI.
The architect
After the subject matter expert outlines BI strategy, an architect must figure out how to implement it. Without a sound architecture, a company cannot produce effective insights from its data because it lacks the proper infrastructure.
Enterprises generating massive amounts of data need systems capable of handling these volumes. BI architects are responsible for designing and implementing scalable, efficient data infrastructure while collaborating with subject matter experts to ensure the design aligns with the business objectives.
The analyst
Analysts develop effective business models and data representations using the database or BI tools. This process defines the relationships between data sets, specialized calculations and data hierarchies based on geography, tax jurisdiction, sales region, product categories and so on. Some of this modelling might already be in place, especially if the organization has a data warehouse.
Even then, BI teams often create ad hoc models for specific purposes, such as experimental advertising campaigns or a special executive projects. These models often fall outside the scope of a data warehouse designed to store authoritative, long-term business records. As such, the team needs a BI analyst to integrate data from multiple sources, establish accurate relationships and formalize definitions.
The designer
While an analyst can build useful dashboards and visualizations, it's not enough for today's enterprises. As data literacy increases among business users -- and as executives grow used to sophisticated technologies in their personal lives -- they expect excellent design, not just functional reports.
Enter the BI designer -- also known as the developer. However, this role goes beyond producing attractive charts. Compelling visualizations are easier to understand and support more effective communication. This, in turn, leads to more engagement, better decision-making and greater executive interest in the team's work.
The data steward or governance director
As soon as an organization begins working with data, it must consider governance and compliance management. This is the data steward's responsibility.
A data steward oversees how corporate governance, ethics, privacy and security policies flow through the business. While this is a demanding task, it might not be a full-time position at first. Like the subject matter expert, this role might start as either a technical or a business one. As such, database architects or business analysts can take on these duties as a shared function.
Data stewards often need legal counsel to interpret legislation. This collaboration includes input from HR to review employee privacy implications and from IT managers to define how policies can be practically applied.
Sustaining and retaining the BI team
Whether an organization creates a formal BI team or assigns the responsibilities to existing staff, leaders must provide continual support and development opportunities.
If the BI team starts informally, it might need to transition into a formal one as workload and business importance grow. Organizations might need to add new members with specific skills, such as machine learning, to keep up with demand.
Because analytics skills are in high demand, businesses must consider how to reward and retain the BI team. For many analysts, the most important recognition isn't financial -- they can easily move elsewhere if money is the issue. Instead, they value the chance to serve as significant advisors to the leadership.
The ultimate measures of success -- such as increased sales and reduced costs -- involve many complex factors. However, acknowledging how analytics contributes to operational, tactical and strategic decisions gives the BI team a strong sense of purpose.
Whether launching a new BI team or scaling an existing one, the future of analytics depends on recognizing and rewarding the team's contributions.
Donald Farmer is a data strategist with 30-plus years of experience, including as a product team leader at Microsoft and Qlik. He advises global clients on data, analytics, AI and innovation strategy, with expertise spanning from tech giants to startups. He lives in an experimental woodland home near Seattle.
