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10 Signs of Business Intelligence Partnerships in Your Organization

In today’s corporate and institutional IT world, much has been done to create “partnerships” between IT and the User Community more often known as the Business.  The users are the people that are responsible for keeping revenue coming in, expenses predictable, and ultimately, bringing in a profit to fuel the company onwards.  There’s many articles published in business and IT journals as to the positive benefits the organization receives when there’s alignment within a Business Intelligence initiative.  So, you’d think that we’ve already dissected and solved this problem and it’s now in the history books.

Not so.   Dilbert is alive, healthy, and very much well fortified in the “partnership” between IT and Business.

Here’s 10 Telltales from a person that has both a IT and Business professional’s perspective that you really do have a Business Intelligence partnership.

1. Lunch. OK, I’m writing this waiting for one of my manager’s to bring me a “sack lunch” turkey sandwich.   But I’m serious.   Lunch.   When’s the last time you have been to lunch with your business user?   When has he or she picked up the tab for that lunch?  Communications is the key to any Business Intelligence initiative since the information requirements are dependent on the external business environment most of the time and, in today’s marketplace, the environment is constantly changing.   Frequency and intimacy of conversation not only about last weekend’s loss of your favorite playoff team but more so what’s going on in business last week that is going to affect the kind of questions you are looking to “ask your data?”
2. Mea Culpa. Saying that you made a mistake…Rework, reloads, unsuccessful night refreshes…operating a business intelligence environment is not easy work.   There’s a lot of moving parts to a mature BI platform along with updates, patches, network traffic and internet dependencies and the like.   There’s got to be daily production huddle sessions, weekly project enhancement meetings, quarterly capital, budget and funding meetings, and annual business strategy alignment sessions.   All of these meetings have to be tightly integrated between IT and the Business in order for the Business Intelligence platform to prosper.
3. Monitoring & measuring. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed” as the modified saying goes.   A mutually-agreed measurement and operational reporting system needs to be applied to any Business Intelligence initiative.  At least, the successful ones.   The partnership has proactively agreed to “what constitutes acceptable” in advance so that both parties can provide a seamless report card.
4. Social measurements, too. Not only do we want to measure “system performance” and other traditional IT operational metrics, one also wants to consider the social aspects of the platform.  Is everyone timely and present at the respective meetings?   Was everyone prepared with their part for the meeting?   Are the “partnership duties” getting deprioritized (this especially happens in the business side since the business operationally will pull the business people directly into business problems and not IT problems.
5. Cradle-to-grave Documentation. Documentation doesn’t mean to just put the information into a project plan when building the BI platform and then shove it into a drawer.  Rather, documentation of the business questions that are asked every day, week, month, quarter depending on the business problems involved.  The business is changing, thus, driving heuristic questioning.   Having an active collaborative environment to document these is extremely important to sustain the platform.
6. Executive sponsorship by both IT and the Business. Even though most of the activity is well beneath the executive offices, the business questions being analyzed and solved are most likely directly related to the profitability and the overall strategy and performance of the business.   So, do they go to lunch?   Do they understand that there’s a Business Intelligence Partnership?  Smile.
7. Show me the money!   Funding. How budgets get spread between IT and the Business can actually be the fundamental reason why a Business Intelligence initiative succeeds or fails!!!   There’s a lot to be said about the CIO that can navigate through today’s budget world.  How a CIO leverages both capital appropriations and current expense for Business Intelligence requires the involvement of the Business.  You see, building the environment with hardware and software and consulting services can all follow GAAP principles for accounting.   Where the difficulty lies is how to separate the operational overhead of running the BI platform along with the constant stream of enhancements.   If one doesn’t budget for the enhancements, the platform ends up slowly (or quickly in today’s economy) becoming antiquated.
8. A partnership of Innovation. Most of what IT does is not innovation itself.  They use innovative technology; although once deployed, it is an operational system that is supposed to run and run and run.  IT professionals are paid to execute, operate, and make budget….and most of the time at the lowest common denominator when it comes to operational availability and budget.    BI platforms are rich with innovation through new technology, of course, but more so through Heuristic Questioning about the business problems at hand that day.  Innovation comes through leveraging data and asking “Why?” and “What if?”   The BI partnership must have an innovation DNA in order to truly leverage the data to its greatest value.
9. Survived a reorganization or three? When, not if, the company/organization reorganizes, the Business and IT organization can change slightly or dramatically.  I have seen many a healthy BI partnership get destroyed over new org charts.   When you reorganize, the IT and Business leadership must have a Partner Summit of sorts in order to protect the operational care, feeding and ongoing plans of the Business Intelligence environment.
10. Internal public relations. I was with the famous Peter Drucker at the 1996 Cognos Convention out in San Diego and had a chance to ask him some questions.   Why can’t we get everyone to want to have their data in one location so we can get rid of all of these disparate spreadsheets?   “In the old days, man fought with swords, daggers, clubs, and ultimately, guns.   We are carnivores and that will remain.  Today, we fight with information.  We hide it, disguise it, hoard it, and mislead with it.   It’s our contemporary personal weapon of force.”  Based on some of the latest stories coming off of Wall Street, the CDO crisis, the Mortgage lending crisis, and the insider trader diabolical, and certainly the many Ponzi schemes that have ruined many a retirement savings plan, I have to agree with what Dr. Drucker said.  At the same time, I truly believe in the good of mankind, if the IT and Business groups have strong leadership, an active business strategy, and a general knowledge that if the team is rowing all at once you can accomplish more than if you are not, then the general support of a Business Intelligence platform will be a positive enabler for the company’s well-being.

There are probably 10 more ideas supporting a Business Intelligence Partnership with IT and the Business.  I hope that these Telltales stimulate you to advance your partnership!  Good Luck!

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