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Building the BI Solution for Small IT Shops

January 8, 2010

Next Wednesday, I get an opportunity to speak with several CIOs of companies with small to mid-size IT shops (less than 20 people in IT).  These CIOs have the unique challenge of maintaining day-to-day operations for their companies while balancing the demands of bringing new technologies to their organizations that will help them to gain competitive advantage.  WHAT A CHALLENGE THESE FOLKS HAVE!!  The same guy that keeps Exchange running is also finding ways to minimize IT spend and figuring out how to integrate a hand-held device into the shop floor, or into a salespersons hand.

My topic for next Wednesday is BI…Business Intelligence.  More specifically, how do you bring data to users who may not be asking using staff that is already stretched to the limit?  As I’ve discussed in prior posts, most find BI to be a big challenge that is expensive to implement and often times fails to deliver what was promised.  This week I saw a small IT shop that tried to solve the data problem “quick and dirty”.  They had the right concepts and brought the right tools to the party, but they were missing the final piece…making the data make sense to the user community.  Essentially once the data had been aggregated it was “dumped” on the end users.  They had data but it still wasn’t providing any insight.

So how do you bring BI in a cost effective, meaningful way to an organization?  I look at it this way:

  1. Identify the end need. What do the users want to see when this is finished?
  2. Identify the available data. What’s available today that will help solve #1 above?
  3. Identify the gaps. Can the gap data “wait”?  Or do we need it before we can make meaning out of #1?
  4. Deliver…deliver…deliver (repeat). If the users have a weekly meeting where they will review this data, they should have one new element (minimum) each week until all are presented.  This gains buy in and confirms that everyone understands the end game.

This method works for both small and large organizations.  It takes discipline and time, an on-going dialog between the developer  and user, and most importantly a developer that understands the business challenges and can bring ideas to help solve those challenges.

-        Happy Building!

Written by Jodie Heflin · Filed Under Business Intelligence 

Comments

One Response to “Building the BI Solution for Small IT Shops”

  1. smcwhorter on January 10th, 2010 5:58 pm

    http://thefuturevalueofbusiness.com/building-the-bi-solution-for-small-it-shops.htm

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