In many organisations, real Business Intelligence is quite new and control processes are still quite immature. People responsible for operative processes are not typically very excited about establishing good control environment. Finance people instead, who mostly are interested in controls, have their hands full of controlling their own finance processes. R&D and marketing, which maybe get the most of Business Intelligence, are often afraid of limitations to creativity that controls may impose to their processes.
Good control environment, by definition, guides functions to reach the objectives and targets of the organisation. Business Intelligence can mislead the functions if misused or poorly controlled. If information is based on weak assumptions or wrong issues have been measured, the conclusions based on this information may be wrong as well. In the worst scenario excited consultants and IT people create indicators in good faith but giving bad guidance, and the conclusions based on those might be dramatic. All Business Intelligence should be under similar control environment as finance data, in order to ensure right knowledge supporting right conclusions.
– Kari Storckovius