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The Reasons Confusion Exists
There are three main reasons it seems. Firstly, some of the confusion stems from the fact that some team members fulfill many different roles in a BI initiative (this “wearing of many hats” can be very confusing in itself). Secondly, confusion stems from assumptions about roles and the personal experience team members have of what those roles may have covered in a previous BI teams. Thirdly, confusion stems from the very dynamic nature of BI initiatives themselves..
1. Business Intelligence Team Members Fulfilling Many Different Roles
The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) research in this area starting in 2000 and continued through 2007, and reported that over the entire period, 91% of the BI professionals surveyed indicated that they fulfilled more than one role on their team. On average it seemed that each BI professional filled 4.8 roles, with just the 9% performing a single functional role. A trend towards specialisation was however evident, the number of BI professionals surveyed in 2006 carrying out more than one role dropping to 89% and the number of roles dropping to 3.27. The reports data indicated that in some cases a role itself might be shared, and in cases like that how are those partial roles divided and clarity maintained? The answer of course lies in defining specific responsibilities in order that the “shared” role is successfully concluded.
2. Assumptions About Roles Based on Personal History
The members of any BI team are very likely to come from different backgrounds and organisations, which means that they will bring with them their own “views” of what each role in the team is all about. In fact, based on the experiences noted during the research, it is clear that the terms of “title,” “role,” and “responsibility” take on different meanings within different teams. In some cases the title is associated to a “human resource” approved description that itself is tied to a salary grade / band, whilst in others the title the roles of logical modeler and data designer and in others that same title includes the roles of physical database designer and database optimisation. As can be seen the definition of the “title” itself needs defining.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this issue for data professionals would be to describe the relationship between title, role and responsibility in terms of an “entity relationship model”. When describing the relationship between title and role one would have to conclude that is a “many-to-many” one, this being true too for the relationship between role and responsibilities. If you can understand the relationships more specifically, you can then resolve the many-to-many’s and that way hopefully make the whole thing clearer to team members. At that same time you can also make sure any “historical baggage” is also dealt with.
3. Changing Roles in Business Intelligence Initiatives
With more traditional projects, the roles and responsibilities in a team tend to be more static. This is not the case with Business Intelligence operations, the very nature of the projects, its iterative nature, shorter project life cycle and the fact that it is often the case that there are multiple projects running at the same time making sure of that. Even if a role was well-defined before, it’s not unusual for that role to change based on the current business situation as the dynamics of the project changes.
Perhaps sport can demonstrate the issue of the dynamic nature of business roles and responsibilities to the roles and responsibilities of cricketers. When a ball is hit between two fielders, whose responsibility is it to catch the ball? There are several possible outcomes: (1) they might both try to catch the ball, run into each other, fall down and the ball hits the grass; (2) they might both assume the other will catch the ball and the ball falls to the grass between them; (3) they might communicate in terms of “I’ve got it” or “It’s yours,” and one of them takes the catch. That’s just how it works in BI teams: members can both grab the responsibility and step all over each other in the process, we can make incorrect assumptions that someone else has the responsibility, or we can communicate in a clear manner, the “Do you have it?” or “do I have “it?” syndrome. You see, even with the best defined titles, roles and responsibilities, in the ever-changing world of BI, you have to communicate to win the game.
Conclusion
So, to improve the effectiveness of any BI team, perhaps the best strategy is to increase the clarity of roles and responsibilities, this being achieved by focusing on the specific responsibilities related to the specific roles that have been defined as being covered by the title in that particular organisation. This done you will have eliminated most of the assumptions and misunderstandings.
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