Does the IT department ever get jealous of the power shift towards
the business user and away from the technocrat? If information is power then
surely nowhere in the enterprise is power shifting more fluidly than in the
deployment of business intelligence systems across the organization.
Managers and executives throughout every company are grateful for
all the dashboard views of system-status they can get. And as we outlined last week, finance officers especially are
hungry for these views, trying as they are to break out of number-crunching
routine and aid in the strategic thinking of the enterprise.
As business intelligence (BI) becomes an indispensable competitive
faculty for every company, IT can either help or hinder the process changes that
will result from its deployment. Patty Seybold, one of the best thinkers in the
area of customer-centricity, has much to say about the technical and
institutional dynamics of BI.
She notes that:
“Today’s business intelligence applications are also among the most
interesting applications because they’re typically written in-house by subject
matter/domain experts; not by professional programmers.”
She warns against locking BI development exclusively into IT’s
portfolio, and recommends segregation instead:
“Development of Business Intelligence Applications Belongs in the
Business Units. These application development tools are designed to be used by
business analysts. You need to deeply understand your business, create a logical
model of your business, and map that model to the ever-changing transactional
activities. Modeling a business is an expertise that resides with the people who
run your business.” – Don’t Shift Business Intelligence into Your IT Organization!
All of this is good advice. Yet the process of programming the
process is still itself evolving. We recall Dovetail Software engineer Scott
Bellware’s observation recently that when you bring the technical ends of the
puzzle closer to the non-technical users, this doesn’t mean you can expect the
users to turn into technophiles:
“It’s geek bias makes us believe that customers want to huddle up
over a programmer/analyst’s requirements DSL
rather than having a focused conversation about the customer’s goals and
capturing those goals in a simple, lo-fi way that is more amenable to the
customer’s predispositions than ours.” – Story Runners
