Based on the Gartner report of 2010 which states that
‘Without business in business intelligence, BI is dead” this is not good news
at all.
The report clearly demonstrates that
·
48% of business executives believed they were approached
only when budgets were required and when IT wanted to hand over their BI
deliverables to them. Some of them felt they were discouraged from
participating in BI projects altogether either by executive instructions from
the company project owner, or by instructions given by the System Integrator
leadership.
·
22% felt that IT did not listen to them, even though they
were the ones funding the BI initiatives. 18% of them felt that their IT
created an environment where communications with business folks was considered
a waste of time and resources resulting in more confusion than providing
solutions.
·
18% felt that IT did not listen to their suggestions or
recommendations.
The report also showed that only 12% of business
stakeholders felt that they had a fair value representation in their own BI
Initiatives, where they were treated as solution partners. However, they also
reported that only 55% of their contributions were valued by the executive
management.
The report demonstrated that the quality and trust
between IT and Business, specifically in BI projects, is not good , and the
latter felt they were not listened to nor leveraged in order to provide the
final BI solutions.
Among reasons for lack of satisfaction with their IT
counterparts were (a) BI team members taking months to deliver critical
reports; (b) IT consistently delivering incomplete reports and analytics that
took months to fix and make useable; (c) IT individuals or groups dominating
discussions by using technical jargon; (d) insufficient attention to business
needs and expectations resulting in delivery of unusable reports; (e) lack of
preparation by IT folks resulting in inadequate deliverables.(f) and IT version
of COE/COC that had nothing to do with building excellence and with no business
participation.
Board members are reportedly doing little to improve the
quality of communications or the interaction between these two groups, with
only 18% of participants discussing ways to improve this relationship and 82%
rarely or never addressed the issue.
At the same time more
than 87% of IT stakeholders in BI projects, i.e. BI Managers, BI Business Area
Owners, Developers and other IT stakeholders, of over 250 companies audited
feel that they too are undervalued on the BI Decision table, according to the
same survey carried out by BI Valuenomics in 2010-12.
At a high level
78% of IT executives believed including business in BI
decisions was not a good idea. Business participation created an avalanche of
unnecessary distractions that increased time and budgets disproportionally. In
26% of the BI project IT recommended their developers not talk directly to
business folks, but let them come via approved channels only. Direct contact
created a lot of unnecessary development confusion with business users walking
up to developers and demanding changes by throwing executive names and threats.
68% of the IT resources felt that business did not really know what they wanted
and thus put them into an endless look of ‘deliver this and then change that’
process.
The report clearly demonstrates that:
·
72% felt that business did not follow the process and
protocol of filling and signing a ‘Functional Spec’ prior to requesting
creation of a report. Sometime they simply sent an email or made a telephone
call and started their times for a report request. Development is not supposed
to start until the functional spec is signed off and business rarely signs off
the functional spec, often expecting the developers to fill them.
·
62% felt that management must play a stronger role in
mandating the following of established processes. However, 68% said they had no
formal process in place.
·
56% of IT folks felt that business did not play the game
fairly by throwing names, demanding changes without a change request and
creating confusions where none should exist. This often resulted in tempers
where they had to work overtime and during weekends to meet business
expectations.
·
32% said that due to lack of planning business would
often give them a request on Monday that they delivered by Thursday only to
have it rejected and with new instructions by next Monday and this could go on
for 2 to 3 months of frustrations on both sides.
·
81% felt that business did not understand the amount of
work that IT did for them
The report also showed that only 127% of IT stakeholders
felt that they had a fair value representation in their own BI Initiatives,
where they were treated as solution providers. However, they also reported that
only 45% of their contributions were valued by the executive management.
The report reaffirmed that the quality and trust between
IT and Business, specifically in BI projects, is not good , and the former equally
felt they were not being being dragged into a process-less world by overactive
business bearcats.
Among reasons for lack of satisfaction with their Business
counterparts were (a) Business not knowing what they wanted and constantly
changin specifications without change process; (b) Business never formally
writing functional specs, or signing them off, and thinking a call for a report
request constituted deliverables; (c) Business
frequently walking in at 5pm and demanding change to a critical report by next
morning for a senior management executive (d) insufficient empathy to development
process, standards and the developers in the process of delivering reports and
analytics; (e) lack of preparation by business folks resulting in inadequate
deliverables.
The ‘Feeling Neglected’ is endemic on both sides
according to the report. So who is wrong.
Actually it is the management that is
in error in these companies. They must commence, if they don’t already have,
the documentation of a ‘Global BI Cookbook’ with clear standards, processes and
other BI details.
In order to resolve a lot of the above issues companies need to
initiate a ‘BI-OnTrack’ workshop and build a ‘BI Process Handbook’ based on clear SIPOC handovers. This must then be
communicated to business and IT folks with a formal signoff.
This can be turned around from the
current sputtering team into a well-oiled machine in a matter of 2 to 4 weeks
only. This is not an assumption as I have done this with a company recently.
The
key is in establishing ‘The Scientific Principles of Information Delivery’ – my
new book due for publishing in Q3 of 2012.
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