The role of business vs IT

Business Intelligence crosses both the business and IT boundaries -- unfortunately for some it is seen strictly as an IT initiative. Frank Buytendijk's post makes an excellent point: "you are not delivering 20 reports", you are helping "business users make really good decisions".

Check out Frank's blog site (he is the VP of Corporate Strategy at Hyperion/Oracle), *new* since Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion.

He goes on to say how the business has bargained (actually leveraged) themselves to the point of 'no responsibility' for initiatives that involve IT support. IT writes the business case for a system to improve the business. IT is responsible for project deadlines and budgets. And who has to live with the results?

The Business.

So wouldn't you want more influence, control, and input into something you have to live with for years, maybe a decade? When I want a vehicle to drive, I don't ask the mechanic to find one for me. Although I'm sure the car would be great under the hood. Because maybe I want my unique style, colour, prestige, the right growl to the engine. Aesthetics. Generally not a mechanic's forte.

So why rely on IT to be responsible for your system's initiative.

Saying that, IT brings much to the table. Such as, people who know what is technically possible, IT project managers, and support staff to keep the lights on once it is built. What they don't bring to the table, which you can, is this:

• Business knowledge and how the business really works.
• What information is important to you.
• How you want to measure your business.
• How a system should improve your processes.
• How a system impacts the bottom line.
• Senior business executive sponsorship.

IT initiatives that only have IT support and little business buy-in is doomed for failure. Maybe not the day the system is released; but months down the line when the business realizes the system doesn't meet their needs.

BI Success Checklist

Excellent post by Timo Elliott about the five fatal flaws of BI. I would use these for any and every BI project. Are you starting BI internally and what to be successful? Use Timo's list as your guide.

Because I work on different projects for various organizations, having a checklist like Timo's would help me focus my efforts in the direction of success each and every time.

Ownership over governance

Knightsbridge released their Top 10 trends in BI. The Whitepaper is brief but they point out that the business is best suited to own and manage the organization's data. Afterall the business supplies the information and consumes the information; taking ownership over how the information is governed for BI only makes sense.

Knightsbridge's "6 key dimensions" for a governance program sound a bit technology and data quality focused. I may supplement them with The Gatekeeper approach and the business committment to taking ownership, especially of meta-data and proliferation of reports.

The ability to bring together multiple business units under Enterprise-level BI will require strong leadership. The business needs to assign leaders who have the authority and influence to navigate the political landscape.

When building a governance model, as Aloys points out, you want to start off with a 70%-right governance model, require committment from stakeholders, and paint a good looking end-state to help stakeholders through change.

Jim Wirth writes a more in-depth post about the top 5 Knightbridge trends.

Rules for corporate reporting

There are a flood of reports being proliferated throughout the organization. Who knows what they are used for. And now the "On-Time Cases" KPI means something different to each department.

Hearing this within your organization? This could be a problem from lack of best practices and governance.

The use of "Content Clusters" for corporate reporting, as Aloys Hosman writes, is an approach to clearly define your governance rules, which could save your organization from this mess.

This technique, among many things, lays out who is responsible for meta data within centrally managed data warehouses -- The Gatekeepers. It is less about ownership of the actual data; instead the discussion is focused on ownership of the metadata.

What I would add is the suggestion of not to detail out the entire governance rulebook at the beginning. See what works for your organization; monitor the process and make improvements. The key is to continuously improve so you don't have to create the perfect end-state at the start.

Flexible tools

You may have heard the words. "Excel-hell".

Defn: The proliferation of Excel spreadsheets through an organization hindering people with their unmanageable and error-prone nature. Usually a band-aid solution used for budgeting or reporting when staff have no other option. Okay, and it's almost free.

But the BI industry has been steering companies away from this for years. BI tools provide all the benefits that Excel doesn't, like distributing web-based reports to many people or programmatically pulling data from disparate sources. So why is Excel still used by so many?

Because Excel is highly flexible and the layout can be changed on a whim. And people rely on what they know best. See Cindi Howson's article comparing Excel.

An executive asks for her numbers to be summed on the monthly report and graphed. It's done in a couple steps. While this seems terrific on the face, this leads a business down the rabbit hole (Excel-hell) where it lacks all the benefits that BI tools provide.

Find the right tool that meets your unique business needs and the needs of the business people.