Data Doghouse - performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing

Business or Technology: Who's the Boss?

It's time to stop getting bossed around by technology.  IT groups too often create their list of projects and priorities based on a logical and mainly technical viewpoint. Their agenda is driven by upgrading hardware and software to take advantage of new capabilities that vendors have built into their products, along with support and maintenance.

A couple of significant trends have occurred in the past decade or so:

The first trend was a drive to reduce costs by combining hardware and software platforms and licenses, along with labor reductions. Mission accomplished.

The second trend was recognition by business executives and groups that this BI, CPM and DW stuff could be leveraged to increase revenue, improve responsiveness to customers, develop products faster, etc. A funny thing happened; IT did not get the memo! IT too often still bases their IT budget and plan on technology priorities and sometimes vendor priorities rather than what the business needs.

The madness has got to stop.

Business is crying for new or expanded BI, CPM and DW programs. Many, maybe most, of your business top initiatives need data. Every one of your data projects should be directly tied to a priority business initiative.

One of the frustrations many IT people encountered with their data governance or integration competency center (ICC) programs is that the business is not really participating at the level needed and easily gets distracted.

Wake up, they are getting "distracted" by the priority business initiatives. If your data governance and ICC programs were an integral part of those business initiatives then the sponsoring business executives would not be distracted and would be committed.

Enterprise data management is a long-term program that requires participation and commitment from both IT and business. To get that they both need to be on the same page. And what better way for the CIO and IT group to understand their business and shape their data projects to what their business needs then by having their data projects be part of the data initiatives.

Most importantly, that’s how you get true business ROI.

 

 

Two key elements to providing data and data integration services

Establishing and operating an Integration Competency Center (ICC)  is clearly an effective approach to breaking down the business, budgetary and political silos within many enterprises.

These silos have resulted in overspending in integration and underperforming in delivering the information your enterprise could use to its competitive advantage. As I wrote earlier, people, process and politics can be inhibitors to truly providing the information backbone to support performance management, reporting and business analytics.

Getting an ICC starts the journey, but you still need to adopt a holistic approach to providing the right information, to the right people and at the right time throughout the enterprise.  The key architectural concept is to enable a portfolio of data and data integration services that people, processes and applications can tap to satisfy their information requirements.

There are two elements to providing the data and data integration services:

First, establish a service-oriented architecture (SOA)  to enable access to these services throughout the enterprise and outside its firewalls with customers, suppliers and partners if desired. SOA has had a lot of fanfare and many of the industry innovators have already made substantial commitments to providing this architecture. There is plenty of industry literature and publicity hyping this trend and I'll leave you to get the details on your own.

Second, to enable SOA data and data integration services you need to have the underlying data integration processes working. Those processes include ETL (extract, transform and load), ELT (extract, load and transform), EAI (enterprise application integration), EII (enterprise information integration), data cleansing, data profiling, data auditing, metadata management and other processes that we've discussed. SOA is a very useful enabling technology but it's the tip of the iceberg while the real "guts" of the data integration service are the processes I mentioned above.

Are you establishing an ICC? Are you creating a data integration services portfolio for your company? What are your concerns and words of advice regarding implementing these services? Pass along your comments and thoughts.