Making BI more decision-centric

My friend Kurt Schlegel at Gartner has just released a new report – Deliver Business Value With a BICC (BI Competency Center) Focused on Decision Making. In it he “identifies the steps required to evolve business intelligence (BI) beyond reporting measures, to making great decisions”. Like Kurt I believe that “Tying BI to the decision made instead of the measure reported will deliver more tangible business value” and adopting decision management more broadly in an organization can and perhaps should start by bringing the BI folks around to a focus on decisions.

Kurt’s report focuses on how to give existing BI staff and resources a more decision-centric point of view and on the additional approaches / technologies they should consider. The focus of a BICC, even a decision-centric one, is still going to be on manual decisions – those made by people. Getting a top-to-bottom focus on decisions is going to require not only a more decision-centric BI approach but also a focus on the identification, externalization and management of high-volume operational decisions. Whether this means expanding the scope of your BICC or starting something separate will depend on your organization.