Analytical Diaries

In his recent post about the alignment of Business & IT senior Informatica Perspective blogger John Schmidt asks the rethorical question whether Business (as a role or organization) needs to be involved in IT decision making & implementation of IT projects. It’s a very worthwhile piece asking the right questions and defending an obvious yet somewhat outdated point of view…

The real question in terms of data integration, business intelligence and making smart use of existing information assets is: Does IT still need to be involved?

And that is not a rethorical question at all! Many of Informatica’s competitors in the integration and BI space actually have started to put that blunt thesis to the test. Why can’t we look at IT as the enabler and catalyst but turn over the execution into the same hands that are held accountable for a company’s success or failure?

Pampering Business

“Their time’s too valueable”, some say – my answer would be that there is no time saved when you have to iterate your requirements n times, specify them to the n-th degree and find out in testing, that they are only partially met.

“They don’t have the skills”, others counter – that is true if you have to be a J2EE crack to integrate or know cryptic and proprietory languages in order to produce your reports and business intelligence solutions.

“They can’t architect on a strategic level”, comes at last – and that might be the fact closest to the truth, however how many long-term application & business architecture masterpieces have you seen drafted, implemented and survive. Even in the best of my experiences these success stories have been overthrown by fundamental changes in the business model or by economic upheavel just as often as not.

For both the IT as well as the business decision makers this paradigm shift holds a lot of promise:

• Being involved one level deeper into the concrete implementations Business needs to think
  and IT needs to develop solutions on a more generic (and thus more strategic) baseline
• IT can become a catalyst and focus its time and energy on truely game-changing innovations
• Business can be empowered to change the rules in their business game very fast and flexible
• Both parties can share their burden in the maintenance and pampering of existing solutions
• The run-the-boat versus change-the-boat ratio will improve

Are there examples out there that did just that, you might ask. Yes, there are – I know at least a few in the integration and business intelligence space.If you know some as well, be as kind as to share them with us.

So be brave enough, whether IT or Business stakeholder and hold out that paradigm to say – IT does not need to be involved.