While it is true that a good management team should have already a general understanding of the priorities of the organization, and how the company strategy(ies) translate into a series of BI initiatives, establishing BI Governance provides a framework by which the proper resources can be aligned to the Business Priorities. In order for the initiatives to be successful they need to be executable. Only by aligning people and resources to a particular project and documenting a project plan is that initiatives become ready to be executed.

Furthermore, a good, solid BI Governance process will establish proper Change Management (CM) and Training policies that facilitate the user adoption process and promote the overall use of BI minimizing the amount of fear and resistance to new technologies from the business users.

The proper BI Governance process will also drive the infrastructure and technology decisions. As both perspectives, IT and Business, are considered when making these decisions the likelihood of choosing the right vendor/platform significantly increase; thus reducing the risk that one of the parties chooses a platform without considering the implications that it will have over the other party (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Business and IT collaborate to align the BI resources to the organization priorities

The fist step to establish an organizational structure of the member of the BI Governance is identifying the stakeholders within the organization. A stakeholder can be defined as someone who has some “skin the game”. Stakeholders usually come three areas:

a) Business: Every business area/department should nominate who their representative is going to be for the BI Governance committee. This will enable equal representation from business across the organization, and thus provide the right forum to make decisions that might impact the revenue and thus budget for a particular business unit. The business area representatives will be responsible for sponsoring particular projects for their home units, explaining to the committee the benefits of the initiatives. At the same they outline a high level impact and change management plan that allows the committee to understand the project being proposed from many possible angles. Part of their responsibilities will include identifying people in their functional areas to support the Data Modeling, Data Integration and BI-Front End efforts from a business perspective.

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