Business Intelligence (BI) Governance

Filed under: by: Art Style and Design

BUSINESS ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN BI GOVERNANCE

The Business area representatives play a key role during the initiatives definition phase. In fact, they actually play a dual role, one inside their particular area, and a slightly different one in the BI Governance committee. Inside their department, it is their responsibility to participate in the internal discussions to analyze the impact that different BI initiatives might have on their organization. They have to take an impartial decision to pick a handful of initiatives that will be taken the BI Governance committee. Once at the committee, the business area representatives need to clearly articulate to the organization the benefits of the initiatives they are sponsoring, as they will be “competing” for resources against other business areas.

In a traditional BI Governance, the job of a business area representative is “complete” when one of their initiatives is approved by the committee. However this is rapidly changing to accommodate other responsibilities like participating in data modeling, data integration and the users’ BI experience.

Business user participation during the data modeling exercise is highly requested as they are the ones who know the operation of the business; they can help the data modeler understand the business processes that are established and identify current and future business scenarios.

The business users’ involvement in data integration is critical to the success of the initiatives. Their knowledge of the data and the business processes makes them ideal candidates to become or designate the data stewards. A data steward is the person responsible to define the data loading exception scenarios and approve the recovery strategies proposed by IT. Furthermore as the business area representatives they have ownership of the Data Quality criteria and policies for the initiative.

Furthermore, as the business area representatives speak for everyone in their areas, it is their responsibility to take ownership of the user experience. The definition of naming standards, folder structures and the report organization in general impacts this user experience. As subject matter experts, they also own the metadata and object descriptions. The establishment of guidelines to govern the creation of additional end user objects (e.g. reports, metrics, etc) also belongs to them as it significantly contributes to define the user experience.

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