Should BI teams be more focused on the business side of things or should they have technical IT expertise?

i4Aid/Internet4Aid RESPONSE:

Ajay Sharma • There is no one answer to this question. BI teams have multiple roles – some of which fit in the business side while others in IT. PMO role is required to manage and deliver to the timelines and comitments from various groups involved in a typical BI project. While business owns the functionality and final outcome of the project, IT should own the infrastrucutre, maintenence, licensing, operational aspects of the BI project. There is general accusation that IT slows down teh project and cant keep pace with the agility required by the business. This is a true statement but can be addressed by carefully designing BI project teams. There are various models that can be implemented based on organization’s structure and culture.

i4Aid • My quick response is that Ajay Sharma presented the appropriate basics including his notion about the integration aspects. Briefly, BI should fill out management policies and provide the first break-down levels for the functional processes but not more than 5 levels of detail. Then IT should review and integrate these processes into their IT framework before doing more levels of detail – it is a kind of first scope and impact estimations as they adjust and balance conceptualization and implementation. Then review and balance with both parties – do this before before specifying any more detail processes and procedures and agree on any high level the risk factors. Then do a rough estimate of project timeline.

We did this on the Toyota Motors, USA National Parts System development and it remained fairly scoped for 1-2 years of our development process such that IBM adopted most of this high-level approach.

I will be entering this in my blog: i4Aid.WordPress.com