There is discussion amongst the CTO and Sales President that Finance should be a customer to BI rather than being the owner of analytics (Business Partner) to all functional groups. What does the rest of the world do?
Where does data analytics reside in a typical organization?
Answers
Personally, I prefer for the
In my experience it depends on the purpose of the BI instance. If Sales wants it for general trending and to find opportunities, it's often cheaper and simpler for a non-financial group to own the implementation. It saves lot of time and effort tying back to the accounting system when the only purpose of the BI system is to show general trends. Often in these cases being within 1% or 2% is good enough and strikes the right balance between system cost and business need.
The clearest changeover occurs when commissions are calculated using the BI system. Then Finance needs to own it, without doubt. And if any financial analytics are calculated from the system, Finance should own it because they’ll need to justify any discrepancies. But there are plenty of sales and operational BI implementations where tie-back to accounting doesn’t need to be 100% and the system can still be very efficient and effective.
The way I see it is that Finance owns the numbers and Finance owns performance
Therefore, BI naturally belongs to Finance and no other function. The worst thing you can do is to put it in IT. That will lead to a slow death of analytics in your company as IT is not able to drive anything with the numbers but simply develop the applications based on input from the business.
In our organization these exist in parallel. We have a team of business analysts and engineers who own their tool that serves BI (Looker), and finance owns financial statements and data produced by NetSuite. But we work together on reports, trends, financial data needs etc - so that the numbers produced by both departments make sense.
I agree with Anders but would add that as Finance depts transition to be the provider of business insight as well as accounting and finance, it should own all functions pertaining to reporting and the analysis of those reported numbers. We recently had a similar situation to the one described, where at the insistence of the CIO the 'gun' data scientist that was hired resided with the IT team instead of the new research team, but because most departments didn't intuitively seek IT's help in analysis, he eventually became irrelevant and was stuck doing more database administration and report creation roles. The power grab by the CIO set back the firm's data and analytics skills by 12 months until the guy was 'rehomed' in the research dept before he resigned.
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