Background:
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) plays a critical role in delivering weather, climate, and water information to support safety, sustainability, and economic prosperity across Australia. With the growing demand for timely, data-driven insights, BoM recognised the need to scale its business intelligence capabilities across the organisation without compromising on governance or compliance.
To meet this challenge, BoM partnered with Exco Partners to establish a Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence (BI CoE) and a supporting operational model that would enable self-service analytics, promote best practices, and manage risk effectively.
The Challenge:
BoM’s decentralised structure and growing demand for data access led to several challenges, including inconsistent business intelligence (BI) practices across teams, limited governance over data usage and reporting standards, and difficulty implementing policy in ways that still supported innovation. These issues also introduced the risk of non-compliance with legal and regulatory obligations. Recognising the opportunity, BoM aimed to create a scalable, policy-aligned BI model that empowers users while maintaining control and oversight.
Our Approach:
Exco Partners collaborated closely with the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) to co-design and implement a Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence, along with a lightweight governance framework. This initiative was designed to support a Community of Practice across the organisation, applying policy in a pragmatic way that ensures real-world usability. It also focused on building capability in a sequential manner to promote sustainable adoption, while establishing clear guardrails that balance innovation with effective risk management. Through this approach, BoM was able to cultivate a culture of self-service analytics that remains aligned with both strategic goals and regulatory requirements.
The Solution:
The solution delivered by Exco Partners included:
- A BI Centre of Excellence to lead strategy, standards, and enablement
- A governance model that is lightweight, flexible, and scalable
- Operational guardrails that empower decentralised teams while managing risk
- A capability-building roadmap aligned with BoM’s policies and maturity goals
The Impact:
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) now operates with a modern, scalable Business Intelligence (BI) model that has delivered measurable improvements across the organisation.
- Decentralised teams are empowered to make faster, data-informed decisions, resulting in a 20% reduction in reporting turnaround times and a 15% increase in the use of self-service analytics tools.
- The adoption of best-practice analytics has improved data consistency and reduced duplication, contributing to a 35% decrease in manual data reconciliation efforts.
- Practical policy implementation has streamlined compliance, enabling BoM to meet regulatory obligations with greater confidence and efficiency.
- A small but thriving Community of Practice has driven innovation, with cross-functional collaboration increasing by 20%, and new analytics use cases emerging across multiple departments.
Lessons Learned:
The journey to scalable, decentralised BI at BoM offered several key insights:
- Start small, scale smart: Piloting the governance model with a few teams helped refine the approach before broader rollout.
- Policy needs to be practical: Translating policy into actionable guidance was critical to adoption.
- Community drives culture: The Community of Practice has become a powerful engine for knowledge sharing and innovation.
- Balance is key: Empowering teams while maintaining oversight requires continuous calibration of guardrails and support.