Organizations may call their data hubs by such varied names as business intelligence competency centers (BICCs) or centers of excellence. But in the rush to better organize and evangelize their treasure troves of information, companies seem finally ready to agree on one thing: Those that implement BICCs are seeing much better results than those that don't.

The purpose of BICCs isn't exactly obscure: to present information in a uniform way across an organization, and in a way that facilitates its usage by employees across a wide range of activities and competencies. So it's not difficult to discern why so many companies—30 to 40 percent of Global 1000 firms, according to a Gartner estimate—have turned to BICCs. Without the organization, coordination, and even discipline that BICCs foster, companies won't see ROI from the resources they have devoted to business intelligence products. Also, the lack of consistency across business units creates problems, both practically and politically.

"I've seen companies that have 20 solutions—homegrown ones, purchased ones, everything," says Michael Smith, Cognos senior manager of product marketing. "Without [a BICC], each unit will have its own product and stand by it, sometimes to the detriment of the big picture. Without a common set of practices, you can't have repeatable success."

This mix of technologies, fiefdoms, and silos makes setting up a BICC more of a challenge than companies might expect. "It's not something you just dive into," warns Gartner analyst Betsy Burton. "What a lot of people get wrong is that BICCs are an ongoing endeavor, not a one-time thing. If they're not dynamic, they create more frustrations than they solve."

Burton suggests that companies ease their way into any BICC project, rather than attempt to get their proverbial ducks in a row beforehand. "It's one of those situations where it's better to start and evolve, rather than wait until everything's been figured out," she says.

One thing that companies must take care of in advance, however, is data quality. While there might be an I-need-the-business-intelligence-and-I-need-it-now mentality among prospective users, these same individuals won't trust the information moving forward if their first interaction with it generates inaccurate or misleading results.

Intelligent Solutions senior vice president Lisa Loftis agrees. She references a glut of examples (alas, she doesn't name names) of companies that bit off more than they could chew attempting to deploy a BICC across all facets of a large organization at the same time. She recommends starting slowly, and setting conservative goals and timelines for the first several months. "You want to get an early win and build on that," she explains. "Once you can hold something like that up to the rest of the organization, you'll get much more interest and cooperation."

And if you don't, well, take it upstairs. Like any other enterprisewide project, BICCs tend to languish without doting or, in some cases, borderline coercive support from upper management. Noting that few companies can be characterized as true "information democracies" in which business units subsume their own goals and preferences for the benefit of the greater good, experts stress that a C-level exec must lead the BICC push.

Involved top leadership can also help in the latter stages of the BICC rollout, especially after the group has notched a few wins. "They can ensure that there aren't bottlenecks in the process," Loftis says. "What tends to happen is as things get off the ground and the organization starts to see results, [the BICC] finds that they're inundated with requests. Somebody up top can help monitor the pipeline and workload."

Loftis and her peers are split on which arm of the organization that executive should reside in. Some believe that the BICC should exist under the purview of a top business chief; others believe that IT should lead the charge. Ultimately, there's no right answer, but both business and technology should be engaged in the early stages of BICC development.

"Organizations have to remember that there's no set correct way to do this right," she adds. "The ones who do this best are the ones who take a good, hard look at all the options out there before jumping into the project."