Business Intelligence

In this day and age (2010), I find it shocking to run into organizations where IT still has a draconian condescending attitude towards business. There are still a handful of organizations where the lords of IT still dictate how and what ought to be done? You have got to be kidding me?! Take a look around, everywhere is corporate collapse, it is at this time in particular when IT needs to be as flexible as an Olympic gymnast to bend over backwards to give the business what they need.

I was chatting to an acquaintance who had recently been laid off from a well-paying IT job during this current economic downturn. She was shocked to hear that the company had gotten rid of the entire section servicing them in IT and had systematically gone down the road of running everything on hosted software and hardware platforms. Having worked in the trenches of this company’s IT some time back, I was not the least bit surprised. I consistently saw the business having to wait for 4 – 6 months for things that should not have taken more than a few days at worst. A simple server that would have cost the average person a couple of grand and a day to setup, cost this organization over $20K per machine by the time all the “appropriate” software and policies were loaded by the large service vendor, multiplied by at least 4 (HA clustering & disaster recovery mirror site) and many months of waiting.

The sooner we learn that IT exists to serve the business and not the other way around, the less daunting the situation becomes, especially when our backsides are sitting in IT seats. If ever there was a slogan to learn today, it would be “It’s about the end user, dummy!” otherwise they will go to someone who will service them.

With BI projects, we should always start by establishing what on earth the users of the system want, but too often we analyze existing report sets to determine the base line. Often a lot of these report sets are never looked at but they get generated “because we have always done it this way”. This type of thinking has GOT to change!!!

Actionable BI requires 3 things that need to be in place at a minimum. If one of these is missing, the whole lot will probably collapse in a heap and the BI / DW project will be deemed a failure:

1. A business sponsor. Who wants the information? Why? What do they plan to do with the information once they have it? The higher up in the organization this business sponsor is, the more cooperation just “magically” happens.
2. Business benefit. What is the current cost of the problem? What is the “do nothing” cost? If the information is delivered, accurate, on time and relevant, what will be the business benefit? Can it be quantified? This is where value is defined.
3. Feasibility. How good / bad is the quality of the data? Can we agree on the base metrics? Is the organization autocratic or democratic in its approach (are there 1 or 2 know-it-all’s or does the climate of information sharing abound?) How much historical information is needed? What should this project accomplish to be deemed a success?

As tempting as it may sound to quickly design, build and deploy the cube (don't get me started on the pitfalls of cubes and why I hate cubes: another day, another post), success of BI projects start and end with the end users of the system. End users are much smarter than most IT shops give them credit for, they understand in detail how the business works, even if they can’t think in terms of ER diagrams, tables, throughput rates and XML.

Just because something has been done a certain way for eons, does not make it right in today’s environment. If practice makes perfect, doing something wrong for a long time leads to eventually doing it “perfectly wrong”. By showing end users respect (as in waiting for them to finish telling us what is bothering them before proposing a solution) and truly partnering (users will smell a fake a mile away), we tip the odds of success in our favour almost without fail.

The old saying “Ain’t mama happy, ain’t nobody happy” is very apt in the world of BI, substitute “mama” with “end users”, who are in fact the customers of BI implementations. One final note: Treat your end users with as much respect as you would your mom and you will be amazed at how they will support you and the insights you discover together could be truly ground-breaking.