For many years the concepts of Business Intelligence and The Data Warehouse were inextricably linked, and for good reason. There was a time that before you could have any meaningful business intelligence information, you first needed to gather together all of your organization’s data into the warehouse. Unfortunately, for many organizations, what started out as a business intelligence project became sidetracked into an unnecessarily large and complex data warehouse effort that lost sight of the original business intelligence objectives. Organizations became bogged down trying to identify and organize ALL of the enterprise’s information into the warehouse, rather than focusing on what was needed to satisfy the BI objectives.

In his classic book “The Seven Habits of Effective People”, Steven Covey states “begin with the end in mind”. We think this is good advice for business intelligence projects as well. Most large organizations have more data than they know what to do with. We think it’s a mistake to get bogged down into identifying and organizing all of the available data. Think about it. Is any decision maker really concerned with ALL the data? Probably not. But decision makers are concerned with getting their hands on the RIGHT data, that key information needed to make effective, business-changing decisions. So we say begin your BI project with the end in mind. Find out what key data is required by the decision makers, then set about the task of identifying and making that key information available to the decision maker.

Many organizations have extremely successful and well managed data warehouse implementations. For these organizations, the data warehouse will likely continue to serve them well into the future. For others, a new breed of business intelligence tools like QlikView are providing a different route to providing this key information. Rather than relying on disk-based data sources, these tools use an in-memory model to that by-passes the need for the data warehouse and provides the business decision maker direct access to any number of data sources. Whether this new breed of tool will replace the need for the traditional warehouse remains to be seen. Regardless of the approach, it’s critical to stay focused on helping decision makers get the key information needed and resist the pitfalls of unnecessary complexity.

Most businesses complain about the complexity (and resulting costs) of their Information Technology.   In this short video, Harvard Business blogger Ron Ashkenas, author of Simply Effective, taps his longtime strategic consulting experience to explain how CIOs can identify the main causes of complexity in IT organizations–and how IT leaders can overcome them.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Features/Cutting-Out-ITs-Complexity/?kc=CIOMINUTE04162010CIOB

There’s been a number of engaging articles and books written about the uneasy (at best) relationship between IT and the business.  Volumes are written about “aligning” IT with the business strategy and objectives.  For years, CIOs have been fighting for the same respect and credibility as other “C-level” executives, and I’m still not sure they’ve made it.  In her Business Week article “8 Things We Hate About IT” and in her book, Susan Cramm summarizes some of the key issues that foster the hate-fest between IT and the business.  And she also points out that the hate-fest is a two-way street (turns out IT doesn’t care much for the business either).

This week’s CIO Insight newsletter features the results of a survey of IT and Business leaders on a number of key issues.  Here’s our take on a few questions from that survey.

Q: Do you think IT is overly bureaucratic and control oriented?

Business leaders: 51%; IT leaders: 37%; Difference: 14%

Our take on this one:  Wait until you see the next question…

Q: Does the business make half-baked requests and is clueless about enterprise impact?

Business leaders: 49%; IT leaders: 63%; Difference: 14%

Our take on this one:  Notice something?  On the one hand, the business thinks IT is too control oriented, on the other, IT thinks the business doesn’t understand the impact of their requests.  Both sides need to work on this one.  IT needs to demonstrate a greater willingness to respond to the business (this doesn’t mean just saying “yes” everytime).  The business needs to understand their request may indeed be more complicated than they realize and that creating good IT solutions is not easy (translated: it takes time and money).  In the end, IT needs to service the needs of the business, so we think the onus falls on IT to get better at communicating with the business (in straight talk, no techno babble) why a request may be complicated, how it can be done and what it will take to accomplish.

Q: Does IT spend money irresponsibly?

Business leaders: 16%; IT leaders: 13%; Difference: 3%

Our take on this one:  This one surprised us.  A 3% difference is negligible, but the real surprise is that 84% of business leaders feel that IT does spend money responsibly.  Good news there for IT.

Q: Do you think IT doesn’t deliver on time?

Business leaders: 44%%; IT leaders: 49%; Difference: 5%

Our take on this one:  It’s not great news when everyone feels that close to 50% of IT projects are not delivered on time.  The surprise here is that IT is actually harder on themselves than the business is on IT.  On the other hand, we understand that it’s IT under the spotlight here, but it does make us wonder how many non-IT projects are delivered on time?   Projects like strategic plans, new building construction, financial budgets, etc.  Hmmm…

Q: Do you think the business doesn’t give IT enough credit for working tirelessly behind the scenes?

Business leaders: 71%; IT leaders: 67%; Difference: 4%

Our take on this one:  If 71% of business leaders feel they do not give IT enough credit, that tells us that the business actually does recognize the hard work that IT is doing day-to-day.  The business is paying attention, keep up the good work gang!

Some final thoughts on the uneasy relationship between IT and the business.  All businesses exist to provide their customers with quality goods and services at a profit, we’ll call that the core mission.  And most businesses have a similar set of functions to accomplish that mission, including sales and marketing, manufacturing/operations, finance, HR, IT and so on.  The closer that every business function gets to supporting the core mission the more successful the business will be.  So is it totally up to IT to make that happen?  Of course not.  Whether it’s a marriage, a sports team, or the relationship between IT and the business, all successful relationships require the patience, effort and cooperation of all parties involved to make it work.

In an October, 2009 report from Information Week entitled “Alternative IT: Software’s New Reality” the author describes how CIOs today are more willing than ever to explore and accept alternative models for providing IT solutions to their organizations. While many organizations will continue with the traditional model of software delivery (licensed software running on in-house servers supported by in-house IT staff), alternative IT solutions are gaining greater acceptance, even in large enterprises. They go by many names, “software as a service”, “cloud computing”, and outsourcing in many different flavors, but one thing all of these alternatives strategies have in common is that the systems are moving out of the in-house IT shop in one way or another.

Even Microsoft, who has made its fortune selling software to run on its customers’ computers, is changing its tune and is planning to offer Microsoft Office, one of the most widely installed software programs in the industry, as an online application. We predict there will come a tipping point of sorts in the acceptance of new computing models. Consider salesforce.com. When we first heard of the salesforce.com model our thinking was “this will never work, sales organizations will never let this precious data off-site”. Wrong. Salesforce.com is a juggernaut in the CRM world with hundreds of very large clients. We think the same type of shift will happen in many more application areas as CIOs see others take the leap and become more comfortable with alternative IT models.