Who should the business intelligence team report to?
We are a business intelligence (BI) team of two, building a BI platform for a bank. We are currently under the IT section in the organizational chart. My question is, what is the best section or department that the BI team should be under or reporting to?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    When you register, you'll receive targeted emails designed to keep you informed of the latest BI, analytics, corporate performance management (CPM) trends and more.

    Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchBusinessAnalytics.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchBusinessAnalytics.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

I'm wondering a bit about your real charter. You say you are building a business intelligence (BI) platform for the bank. I think it's obvious that a bank can use BI and that there are many leverage points in having some centralization of BI architecture, tool selection, standards and processes. If you are indeed building a single BI application, which is likely given that the team is two people, you will want to consider it the beginning of the BI journey at the bank -- and make decisions that will scale to the next application. While it's important to be highly integrated with the business unit(s) interested in the application, that can be accomplished from IT. I always recommend some of the BI organization be in IT. Over time, as BI grows, it can become a smaller percentage of the overall BI (virtual) team, but starting out, as you may be doing given the team is two, it needs to be in IT.

More about business intelligence teams

 

This was first published in July 2008

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.