APC forum: Governing the wild west of predictive analytics and business intelligence

CIO's achieve IT and business strategy alignment while effectively managing IT expenses using project portfolio governance tenets advanced in the early 2000's. However, today's IT context is characterized by the proliferation of big data, business intelligence and predictive analytics projects often incubated in business units but that require IT's commitment for effective deployment. For CIO's, the IT governance approaches of the past need to be augmented with new methods, exemplars and reference models. We discuss three pillars to IT governance for this new era: a general model of big data and analytical solution deployment, a summary of current industry best practices and a taxonomy of plan, design and execution imperatives. These pillars provide foundation for an Analytics Capability Reference Model that has been validated in industry settings.