One of the major challenges of any business intelligence implementation is finding and retaining skilled personnel in an environment where demand far exceeds supply.
"This is clearly evident in SA," says Bruce Bond-Myatt, consulting manager: Financial Services of SAS Institute, leader in business intelligence.
Not only are skills already in short supply, but independent research firm, Gartner predicts that by 2006, large enterprises will need three times as many BI personnel as they did in 2002.
Companies therefore need to focus on retaining good people, and ensuring that they are structured such that their skills are best leveraged.
"Enterprises should concentrate their valuable analytical resources," suggests Bond-Myatt. "In this way they achieve critical mass in terms not only of effectiveness, but also in terms of achievements and career opportunities."
He points out that if analysts are doing valuable work, they will want to remain with the organisation. If, however, they are seen simply as report writers, they will not achieve job satisfaction and are likely to move on.
"Too often, analysts spend large amounts of time doing routine data extraction work, or reports, and have no time for ad hoc work."
Because skills are so scarce, it is difficult for companies to have analytical skills scattered throughout the organisation. Increasingly, therefore, companies are concentrating these skills in a central function. In this way, they gain the ability to leverage off scarce resources to develop and implement best practice BI processes from a centralised point.
SAS is putting into place a program to assist customers in setting up and running a SAS competency centre that helps leverage their investment in SAS technology by focusing their SAS competency within the organisation. This aligns well with the Gartner concept off a BI Competency Centre for enterprises embarking on BI programmes. Such a centre also brings together business, analytical and other IT skills, and incorporates development and maintenance of the BI platform, production support, BI delivery and data governance.
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