BICC – Business Intelligence Competency Centre
In my humble opinion, a BICC is essentially a coordinated effort to achieve and maintain a set of best practices and standards for your BI implementations. The BICC serves as the focal point for addressing all future BI development, acts as a front-line resource to answer how-to’s, and establishes a set of corporate standards. The goal is to learn and document from the initial deployment, and then build a scalable template to repeat the process in the future. Wash and rinse….wash and rinse.
In my particular organization we have a smorgasbord of Cognos products being used: Power Play Transformer, Metric Manager, Access Manager, Report Studio, Impromptu, Cognos SDK, and the list goes on. I wasn’t even aware of some of the resources that showed up on our Cognos Support contact list. The point is that we do not have a centralized Cognos group and we are currently working in silos.
The good news is that we are in the infancy stages of establishing our internal BICC with a small group of resources that will dedicate a portion of their time. The BICC will not take up 100% of everyone’s time, but as tasks come up then they will take priority and there will be monthly meetings to review statuses and make recommendations.
I think that it’s a valuable exercise to at least review the literature that Cognos is providing related to BICCs. It appears that SAS is the cornerstone for most of the templates and processes that have been generated for BICCs, so you may want to also visit their site as well. So now you’re a lit bit more familiar with BICCs and can 100% say that they are not just cigarette lighters!
