Business Intelligence Competency Center

A Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is a team that supports the use of business intelligence (BI) in an organization.^[1] Since 2001, the BICC concept has been refined through implementations in organizations that have adopted BI and related analytical software.

Usage of the term BICC has varied significantly between implementations in different organizations. The adoption of the BICC concept has led some organizations to establish units that focus on the use of BI software for decision-making, which may increase the value an organization gets out of its implementation of BI.^[2]

A BICC coordinates activities and resources to facilitate a fact-based approach to decision-making within an organization. It has responsibility for the governance structure for BI and the use of analytical programs, projects, practices, software, and architecture. A BICC is responsible for developing plans, priorities, infrastructure, and competencies that can support strategic decision-making using BI and analytical software.^[3]

Definition

Applications

Analytics Competency Center (ACC)

In recent years, knowledge-oriented shared service centers have emerged in many organizations. Their primary focus has been the offering of analytics and data mining as an internal service across the organization.^[4] Such a center may be referred to as an Analytics Competency Center (ACC), Analytics Center of Excellence, Analytics Service Center, Big Data CoC, or Big Data Lab.

By the end of 2017, a report by Gartner Research estimated that approximately 25% of large firms had a dedicated ACC unit (or equivalent) for data and analytics.^[5] In contrast to classic BICCs, these centers do not place emphasis on reporting, historical analysis, and dashboards. ACCs aim to enhance a company's data capabilities by building expertise in data analytics, formulating a data strategy, identifying use cases for data mining, and promoting the adoption of analytics within the organization.^[6] Although BICCs can change into ACCs, new ACC formations can also occur in practice.