Services > Enable > Center of Excellence

Part think tank, part R&D lab, part SWAT team. 100% focused on business intelligence.

A Center of Excellence gives BI some chops.

So, this is not your first rodeo. You've done BI. You've assembled a team and delivered some capabilities, like an enterprise data integration project or a process improvement dashboard. But end users are exporting the (newly, fabulously consolidated) data to their own data marts for analysis, or they're still relying on spreadsheets alone to report process improvement metrics. With so many projects competing for funding, and IT shortstaffed, the executives at your organization look at proposed BI projects and tell you that they've been to BI and done that, and all they got was a T-shirt.

It might be time for a BI Center of Excellence (CoE).

Like we said, a CoE can give BI at your organization some chops: some respect and acknowledgement that BI is different from other types of projects; that it is an ongoing effort to use data as a competitive asset; that it merits specialized resources; and that it deserves a budget that accommodates more than one-off projects as needs arise.

But first, the BI at your organization has to have some teeth. Clarity can help you find them, and prove they exist.

We are experts at identifying and drawing out the business value in the BI you've already built. We do this by:

• Unearthing latent data.
• Clarifying and validating business requirements and linking them with the data that facilitates them.
• Documenting the development process for BI to make it transparent.
• Defining the use cases for your BI to date, and quantifying their results.
• Helping you apply your current BI capabilities to one or two high-profile opportunities, particularly those that involve using data in revenue-generating or costs-savings activities.
• Creating and executing a project plan to realize those opportunities.
• Championing all of the above to your stakeholders--both executives and users, so that you can gain not only funding but buy-in.

From there, we'll help you build a CoE that makes sense for your organization. We can structure it so that it's a competency center focused on development, a governance center focused on standards and management, or a hybrid somewhere in between. Whatever the detalls, we'll ensure that your CoE is equipped to do all of the following:

• Bring thought leadership to your organization's BI; catalog best practices in planning, architecture, and development; and capture information from project implementations.
• Stay ahead of advancements in BI, and develop and refine methodologies accordingly.
• Bring the special weapons and tactics of BI together as a service, and make them available to data-centric initiatives and systems on demand, enterprise wide.

If you're ready to build a CoE, or to find out whether your organization is ready for one, contact us today.