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!

The whole experience reminded me of what it’s like to be in the operational side of the business requesting services from IT. Think about the SNL sketch with Nick Burns the Help Desk guy.  He speaks a language that his customers don’t understand and then treats them like they are stupid for not getting it.  The customers eyes glaze over thinking, “so…um…ok… how will you fix my problem?”

Is your IT department speaking your language?  If not, then how will they ever help you to solve your business problems?  Chances are they don’t understand you either.  Bridging the gap takes a skilled interpreter who can understand both.  Your best BI architects do this and don’t try to explain ETL, Dimensional Models or ODS to you…cuz really…do you care how it works if it answers your questions and helps to make sense of your data.

I get it, the oil is like politics; it’s the grease that ensures the proper movement of the smaller parts to produce the much desired resultant.  However, I never cared much for the political side of the business.  But, let’s take a closer look at this, because I fear we get confused. When I rethink the above metaphor, what I really see are the following components:

•        An engine – well, this can be a company or organization or team of any sort
•        Smaller parts – I suppose this represents the individuals or groups or departments of folks. The bottom line is that the small parts ultimately consists of people.
•        Oil – In our example above, the oil is often referred to as ‘politics’. Let’s go with this for now.
•        The resultant – Here the engine has a purpose or outcome. This is the reason the engine exists; for a series of purposes. In real life, the engine delivers power that sparks momentum (pun intended!) and with this inertia we receive a change in location (we were here and now we are there). This change in location could be a sales goal or business strategy and so forth along the analogy vector.

However, is it really safe to say that the oil is politics? I’m not feeling that one, sorry to bust your nice metaphor. But, what really serves as the layer of protection between people? After all, this is what we talked about when we were praising the magic of the oil. How do people work together at a high rate of speed with very low tolerances between integrated points?  The answer is found in leadership. This is the true oil. Leadership creates the necessary layer of ‘protection’,  if that’s the best word to describe it and I’m convinced that it is not, that protects people.

Leadership must create a safe space where people can trust. A place where people can have the right conversations. It’s a mechanism that produces highly invested people who share the resultant at the highest level. It’s a bunch of folks that actually care and are stimulated to action by their passions of doing what’s right and not afraid to share this information by being vulnerable and accountable to each other. Its understanding that you will elevate yourself only after elevating the engine by achieving the resultant!

Now that that is on the table, we are still left with that term ‘politics’ or ‘acting political’. Don’t sell yourself short by just assuming some level of magic happens that covers off leadership and label it ‘politics’. Don’t say, well it’s political so we’ll have to wait and see. Don’t think that anything is too political. Call it how you see it… acting political is really done by people who are very short sighted. These folks think that they need to elevate themselves by elevating themselves. They don’t see the power that the shared engine can bring. So, acting political is really the process of adjusting what you say to fit your immediate audience.  Doesn’t that really resound with you after watching ‘politics’ on TV?

Bottom line is: “Let your yes be yes and your no be no!” In other words, do what you say and say what you do. Be a straight shooter. Be honest and accurate. Follow through – make your words powerful by embracing them with action.  Sometimes, this crazy world makes sense when one person makes a stand by seeing the issue and being genuine about it.

~   Scott Felten

“What?” you say.  “Dave, I thought you were really into blogs.”  “Are you not in charge of your company blog?”

I am the guy who is the champion here at LUCRUM for this blog, and I am not the slightest bit surprised that people don’t trust “company blogs.”  People don’t generally trust companies, they trust people.  To be trusted takes time.  People need to understand each other.  People need clear expectations of one another.  People need honest interaction and discussion with other people to create trust.   Need proof?  The same study shows that the most trusted channel of communication is email from PEOPLE YOU KNOW.  (Not SPAM!)  People trust other people.

For a company blog to be successful it needs to be about the people.  It needs to be a forum for honest discussion, creative ideas, and interesting conversations.  The same Forrester report goes on to outline how to create greater trust and improve a “company blog.”

One of the suggestions offered is to write about the problem’s of your customers.  Explore ways that you might be able to solve those problems, and start a ongoing dialog.  This is a great way to drive valuable innovation and demonstrate a willingness to listen to the wants and needs of your clients.

However, my favorite piece of advice from the article pertains to B2B companies.  Forrester advises firms to “let their employees get in on the act.”  Having a sanitized, polished, pre-approved blog, completely devoid of the real input of real people is a sure fire way to destroy trust.  Authenticity can not be manufactured.   This point pertains back to my initial statement that of course people don’t trust company blogs, they trust people – real people.

Another important item to point out is that blogs, social networks, email, phone calls, and all other communication tools don’t live in a vacuum.  They work together.   A blog can be a very important tool in helping people to understand your firm, your culture, and the value you can deliver.  However, the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and transparent.  You can’t be one thing on your blog, another on LinkedIn, something entirely different in your print collateral, something even more different on the phone, and then something else in person.   Chances are that if people don’t trust your blog, it has little or nothing to do with the blog itself.  It has to do with your behavior not reflecting the story you tell on your blog.

People trust people.

People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it.

My thanks to Mike for taking the time to share his story.

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During the recent recall during the recent 4th of July holiday, no less, a local grocer notified their customers in a variety of ways. They placed signs in stores in meat departments (but if you are in the store buying meat – chances are you may have already consumed the meat you previously purchased).
Thanks to their frequent shopper program, they were able to track purchases by customers who use the company’s loyalty card. This is normally used to track purchases to accrue fuel discounts, or receive coupons and discounts on future purchases. During the recent recall, they printed a message at the bottom of the receipt to customers whose history showed they may have purchased the recalled product (and instructed the checkout clerk to point out the notice to consumers). In other cases, they actually called customers who used the loyalty card to purchase the tainted product (what a great motivating factor for encouraging consumers to keep their card information updated!).

Obviously a phone call would be best – since there is a time dependent factor for many shoppers – who purchase and immediately use the meat they purchase – but register tape alerts are great for those who stock up and placed the meat in their freezer for later consumption. Better late than never.
Loyalty programs sometimes come under fire – “what is being done with the data?”
“Are they selling personal information?” “Why do I have to give up that information to get lower prices?”

Generally, however most retailers promise that any proprietary information is not shared and only aggregated item data is shared with their vendors. In today’s competitive environment, businesses continually strive to “focus on the customer” and make the customer “# 1” – and develop the strategies that put the customer at the center of their business. Doing so makes customer data increasingly important, with loyalty programs serving as a very effective way of capturing customer data.

Another benefit of customer loyalty programs is the ability to foster two-way communications with customers – this can be done by implementing an active customer feedback system and listening to customers. It not only provides a way to capture customers’ concerns, questions and complaints, but as described above, it can offer a great way to reach out to customers.

For now, I’m fostering two-way communications with my customers by meeting with them, and having conversations with them about how they are communicating with their customers – both internal and external. I’m learning a lot, and hopefully gaining insight into how we can best work with them to facilitate this process. Clearly “one size fits all” won’t be the right answer. By listening, and asking questions, we can make a lot of progress in jointly defining the solution. How are you communicating with your customers?