information technology

Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, project management, technology , , , , , , , ,

There is a strong link here to my Vision vs Pragmatism article. In this I argued that Vision and Pragmatism are both essential for the success of any project, be that related to change, to IT, and certainly when using IT to drive change. Unsurprisingly, similar comments apply to whether a holistic or incremental approach to BI is the superior route. However, in this case, I will come down more firmly on the side of one of the options.
 
 
The benefits of an incremental approach

Of course the secret of the success of many projects is their incremental nature. Incremental deliveries, particularly those early on in a project, enable you to do a number of things, including: –

  1. Proving that business value can be added the work that you are doing
  2. Showing tangible evidence of progress
  3. Demonstrating that the project team is responsive to business priorities
  4. Chopping up funding into more digestible parts
  5. Providing early exposure to change management issues; allowing time to learn from mistakes when still operating at on a smaller scale

Overall incremental work can enhance the credibility of a project team and thereby made it easier to secure senior management support. Such work is indispensable to any project.
 
 
How does the sum of the parts measure up?

However there is a point to be made here in favour of a holistic approach which goes beyond my previous preference for always having an overarching vision. This is something that is specific to business intelligence and relates to the nature of information delivery. In a nutshell the sum of several incremental BI developments may be considerably less than the whole if each is not part of an overall strategy.

BI is about having the information necessary to run the business. However, it is also about how that information is delivered and how internally consistent it is. Often BI projects aim to address a fragmentation of existing reporting systems that leads to confusion amongst users and even a general distrust of figures. It is entirely possible to perpetuate this situation, simply replacing older reporting technology with shiny new ones. Each of these new systems may be easier to use that its predecessor and offer significantly greater access to information, but the fragmented nature of information provision will not have been addressed; it may even have been made worse.
 
 
A single platform

The ideal for a BI solution is to have a single platform which supports all pertinent reporting needs. There will undoubtedly be different segments of this, tailored to different groups of users, but these should use subsets of the same dimensions and measures and the same reporting and analysis tools should be used. Adhering to these precepts means that when users of one part of the system need to employ another part, they are not taking a step into terra incognita, but instead are familiar with their surroundings and get the sense that the same logic pervades all of the system.

On a practical level, this approach minimises costs due to software licenses and simplifies your technical architecture, again keeping a lid on expenditure. Fewer people are also needed to both build and maintain a single, central system than many divergent ones. Just as importantly, a single-platform approach means that training becomes focussed on business issues rather than the functionality of a different reporting suites. My experience suggests that, after an initial investment in thorough training for users, introduction of new reporting capabilities can be very smooth and efficient in such a set-up.

Of course developing good BI takes time and effort. Getting to the eventual ideal state that I have described above will undoubtedly take some time (in my most recent BI project it took five years to fully realise). This means that there is no real alternative to the incremental approach that I described at the beginning. However, taking a more holistic approach ensures that your incremental deliveries are aligned with both each other and overall business needs. It also means that with each incremental release there is a related reduction in fragmentation. This is the difference between slowly unveiling a large, coherent edifice and revealing several separate sculptures one at a time.
 
 
The link with cultural transformation

In particular if an aim of your BI project is to transform how users behave (of course this should be a central aim of any BI project, what else is BI for?), then this is going to be most easily achieved with a holistic approach where each phase builds on the success of the previous ones. In this scenario, each incremental delivery can be seen more as extending the remit of your BI system to a new area, rather than adding on a new module. Phase N+1 always reinforces the messages from Phases 1 to N. Each step reduces fragmentation, increases consistency and further improves decision-making. This is the best way to make sure that your BI efforts exceed the sum of their parts, rather than falling short of them. Such a rigorous approach is also the best way to ensure that you meet your cultural transformation objectives.
 

Actionable Information

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, management information, technology , , , , , , , , ,

sarah-burnett

I was browsing through Sarah Burnett’s blog and came across an article about Actionable Information. I thought that this was making a very strong point about what constitutes good BI and what doesn’t. While BI technologists can become incredibly focussed on the intricacies of warehouse design or complex ETL, it is undeniable that all of this is worthless unless it serves to answer real business questions. You can have a perfect technical information architecture and yet all of your efforts will go to waste if there is not sufficient alignment with what people actually want to report on.

This seems like a really obvious point to make, but during my career I have seen many reporting and analysis systems fail to take it into account and observed their designers consequently scratching their heads over poor usage numbers. Elsewhere I have argued that it is helpful to treat the systems (and the change related to them) like products that have to be marketed professionally. The product analogy works equally well in stating that BI needs to address the requirements of its users, else it will stay on the shelf of the systems’ super market. Sarah makes this point very well in her article and it is one that I will come back to in the future.
 

 
Sarah Burnett is a software industry analyst. Her main area of research is Business Intelligence. She am also interested in Public Sector IT and Green IT.
 

Scaling-up Performance Management

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, international projects, it business alignment, management information, project management, technology , , , , , , ,

This was the title of a presentation that I made at the Butler Group BI Symposium in London during October. In this article I wanted to focus on just one theme that I discussed; namely meeting the management information needs of a variety of business units, each of which spanned a number of different countries across Europe.

The eight European countries impacted by my BI project

This seems like a very obvious thing to say, but if you goal is to meet the management information needs of a wide range of business units across multiple countries, then it helps to work with quite a few of them to figure out what they want, where this overlaps with your project objectives and how to get everything aligned.

In my experience things have always worked best when the project team have recognised this early on. In a recent European-based project, my team initially spent nine months working with a group of 30 business people from ten different departments and eight different countries (of course this process lasted a total of nine months, we did not lock them up in a room for the duration). We called this group our Extended Team. Part of our work with them was gathering requirements – we started with a blank sheet of paper and asked them what metrics they wanted to run their company. We then went through the painstaking work of better defining these ideas, distilling them down into different themes, making mock-up reports and eventually iterative prototypes. At each stage, we met again with the Extended Team and got their further input.

Now while this is a great way of gathering requirements and ensuring that your product will answer real business questions, it is and even better way to create a core group of business people who feel strong ownership of the product and are proud of their association with it. In turn, this helps amazingly with driving cultural change. On returning to their day jobs after a typical two-day meeting, the members of the Extended Team would be very positive about what they were involved in doing and share their enthusiasm with their colleagues. Momentum starts to gather and you begin to create a buzz about the project.

As well as being the people who helped us to make the eventual business intelligence system user-friendly and business-focussed the Extended Team were also our marketing representatives in the regions and helped to build up positive expectations about the system.

We put a lot of thought into the type of person that we wanted on this Extended Team. We wanted people who were leaders, who were open to doing things in new ways, who were comfortable with technology and who took an analytic approach to their work. This group made a major contribution to the success of the project. It would not have been possible to scale-up our solution without their assistance.
 

 
Continue reading about this area in: Developing an International BI Strategy.
 

Will the economic crisis actually be positive for BI?

Peter James Thomas bi and the economic crisis, business, business intelligence, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , ,

This article was prompted to some extent by a discussion posted in the Enterprise Performance Management group on LinkedIn.com (the thread may be viewed here, but you will need to be both logged on to LinkedIn.com and a member of the group to view it).

DJI

The economic turmoil encompassing much of the world is certainly being felt in IT. As one of the largest areas of expenditure in an organisation, IT is always somewhere where it is tempting for those looking to make cuts to start. In many organisations, IT expenditure has been under pressure for many years as rising software costs have taken a larger chunk of overall expenditure. Replacement of obsolete hardware and software is also something that cannot be put off indefinitely and such work often further reduces the CIO’s room for manoeuvre. These factors tend to lead to either stagnant or reducing IT budgets. In some organisations, cuts are “democratically” spread across all areas of IT, but the more sophisticated operators will look to be selective. In this second type of organisation, it has been suggested that business intelligence (BI) may be one of the winners. This article explores this idea.

It is first of all important to realise that sometimes investment in BI is driven by a crisis. When things are going wrong, or have already gone wrong, then the instinctive reflex of CEOs is to want to know both what is happening and why. Often they will find that they do not have the tools in place to answer either of these questions and BI is the best way of addressing this need. In relation to the credit crunch, this type of BI investment can be thought of in the same way that greater focus was placed on control systems and internal auditing in the aftermath of the Enron and WorldCom debacles (they now seem a lifetime away don’t they?).

However, there are some things to be said against this. First, the current crisis is not within a single company, but across virtually all companies. Second, the factors behind the crisis are already apparent: a drying-up of commercial credit as banks do a 180° in their appetite for risk and seek to rebuild devastated balance sheets; and, proceeding from the first factor, a plunge in consumer and business confidence as individuals and companies face – at best – straitened financial circumstances and – at worst – insolvency. Of course the combination of these issues leads to a vicious circle. Good BI is not necessary to qualify these already crystal-clear problems.

Despite the systemic nature of the challenges, companies that have already made investments in BI will have tools at their disposal that are pertinent to navigating some aspects of the current financial difficulties. This should place them at a competitive advantage to organisations that have not been so foresighted. As ever corporate discomfort will not be spread evenly across the board. Whilst all companies will suffer, the strongest ones will suffer least. These organisations may even be able to take advantage of their competitors’ travails to expand market share and attract disaffected customers. One thing that will undoubtedly be a feature of the strongest companies is good BI. These observations may be enough to drive continued support of BI in organisations that already value it, they may even lead to a mild expansion in facilities. But what can we say about those companies that have not already invested in BI?

It is undeniable that creating good BI from scratch is both a lengthy and costly process. I would argue that – in normal circumstances – the payback is extremely positive; indeed BI is one of the highest-yielding types of IT projects. The challenge is that the financial crisis is biting deeply now and BI’s benefits are in the future; at least a year away for most organisations (though it is feasible that some interim solutions to the most pressing questions could be produced more rapidly). Is this a time at which senior management is likely to be receptive to an investment with a medium-to-long term payback, no matter how large that payback might be? The answer to this question probably lies in the degree to which the external crisis has been reflected in an internal crisis. If a company is fighting for its survival day-to-day, then existing BI will be invaluable, but BI with a delivery date in 12 months time is not likely to get very far up the priority list; paying suppliers and staff in the next few days is a more pressing issue.

So my opinion is that there is scope for expanded BI expenditure in those companies that have already made investments, this may be related to specific tools to help take advantage of customers deserting distressed competitors. There is also scope for BI projects to be initiated in companies that are suffering, but whose business is essentially sound. In these types of businesses decisions can still be taken with an eye on the medium term. However a balancing factor is that companies whose future is in the balance are very unlikely to see BI as a major contributor to any short-term turn-around strategy. In these organisations, slashing all IT expenditure is more likely to be the prevailing wisdom.

In aggregate it is difficult to work out the impact of these different trends on the BI market. This will depend sensitively on the triage of companies into the groups identified above. My unscientific sense is that BI may fare marginally better than many other elements of IT, but the overall outlook is negative in the short-term. However, for those companies that survive the down-turn and have not already put a BI strategy in place, it may well be that the area will see renewed interest once the economy reaches calmer waters. This realisation may well arise from noticing how much better those companies with good BI have fared in difficult market conditions.
 

 
Since writing this article, I have penned some others in the same area and also found a number of interesting pieces elsewhere on the web. In response to this I have created a WordPress category “BI and the Economic Crisis“, which will hopefully provide a hub for this important area.
 

Business Intelligence and Transparency

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, cultural transformation, enterprise performance management, it business alignment, technology , , , , ,

Transparent

“There is nowhere to hide”

This is something I have heard from a number of business people when they have begun to appreciate both the power of well-designed business intelligence (BI) and, more importantly, the way that it lays bare what is happening in different parts of an organisation. There is a dawning realisation that not only can they get at the numbers that they need to run their business, so can their colleague in the next office, or their counterpart in another country. So can their manager and their manager’s manager.

Of course it might be thought that there is a negative connotation to the “nowhere to hide” phrase. However, my experience has been that instead business people warm to the even playing field that good BI delivers. What happens is that people begin to focus on relative performance, rather than just absolute performance.

Maybe before the advent of BI, a manager might be content that he or she was meeting their targets. Now they can see that while they are meeting their targets, so are all of their colleagues, against whose performance they will be assessed. As well as meeting their targets, some of the manager’s colleagues are comfortably exceeding them; perhaps the manager ranks only 8 out of 10 peers. What is crucial here is that they can see how they are placed early enough to do something about it; to catch up with their colleagues that have moved ahead. The upshot of this healthy competition is that overall performance increases.

The transparency that is a major attribute of BI can provide the impetus to raise business performance from the adequate to the outstanding. As well as maybe providing an incentive to the underperforming, it is a clear way for the best performers to demonstrate what they have achieved and for benchmarks to be set for the rest of the organisation.

When there is nowhere to hide, then rewards and remuneration can be more clearly aligned with performance and the workplace becomes a clearer, rules-based place to operate; one where good work is more easily recognised and decisions are based on facts. This cultural transformation is an excellent outcome for both the organisation and its employees.
 

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Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus

Peter James Thomas business, change management, it business alignment, technology , , , , , , , , ,

Home for Business People and IT Practitioners?

Chase Zander were kind enough to invite me to their recent Change Director Forum, which took place on 11th November 2008 in London. As per their web-site: –

The event focused on IT-Enabled Change and sparked an interesting debate from the floor into the issues facing change programmes and projects which often rely heavily on the introduction of new information technology.

Some related items began to spark ideas in my mind: –

First, one of the speakers, Dr. Sharm Manwani from Henley Business School, referred to a survey of senior IT managers which asked them about areas in which they felt a lack of skill might be reducing their effectiveness. The area that came out as most important was “interpersonal skills”. Many people also said that they lacked in-depth knowledge of their organisation’s business, but this was not seen as a major problem by respondents.

Second, during what proved to be a lively debate, many attendees made reference to “IT” and “the business” in the way that one might juxtapose Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. This is a common refrain whenever IT managers are gathered together. Often a key issue is whether IT or the business (again that juxtaposition) should own projects, or strategy development, or technology budgets.

Third, Dr Manwani, in what was an illuminating talk, presented a chart which featured “in between” roles such as “business solutions manager” or “programme manager” which are intended to form a bridge between IT and the business. He also questioned whether there might be better ways to bring business and IT together.

To my way of thinking, if you need to form a bridge between IT and the business, then you are already facing a major problem. Even in today’s web-enabled, always-connected world, it appears to be acceptable for IT and business to be viewed as something separate: Business is from Mars and IT is from Venus. It is OK for business leaders to express a lack of knowledge about IT and for IT leaders to express a lack of knowledge about business; in some organisations it may even be a badge of honour for both “sides”. The word “sides” appears in inverted commas intentionally; this world view is a major part of the problem in my opinion.

Maybe I was just lucky enough to spend the formative years of my career in an organisation where IT was the business, but I would argue for a reassessment of the spurious dividing line between IT and business. I believe that IT is a business discipline and that the best IT managers are business managers. They are people who have a particular skill-set that they can bring to business challenges; in this respect they are no different to sales managers, or finance managers or any other manager with a specific hinterland of expertise and experience.

In many ways, it seems that IT managers are happy with the perception that that are somehow different. They may even revel in the mystique of the “dark arts” that they and their department practise. Perhaps being seen as different helps self-esteem. Less positively, in disavowing their full business role, perhaps many IT managers are content to retreat into their speciality. It is maybe comforting to have the middle-men, such as business solutions managers to act as insulation and to take the blame when things go wrong. How often have we all heard IT managers cite poorly defined or shifting business requirements for systems’ failures? How often is the lack of a clearly defined business strategy offered as an excuse for the lack of a clearly defined IT strategy?

I believe that these types of complaints are indicative of a pernicious problem in IT management. It is human to look for others to blame when things go badly, but if IT managers do not properly understand business issues, if they do not become part of the overall business management team and if they allow themselves and their departments to become semi-detached, then they really only have themselves to blame.

So, rather than ending on a negative note, let me repeat my call for IT managers to start to view themselves more as business managers. In embracing the ever increasing tempo of modern business and better understanding the dynamics that drive this, IT managers can both be more effective in their roles and also enjoy themselves much more at the same time. Surely those outcomes merit what is probably not an enormous investment of time and energy.
 

Welcome

Peter James Thomas business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, it business alignment, technology , , ,

Welcome to my new web site, which has a twofold purpose.

The first of these is to showcase my career successes and highlight my experience and expertise. This is done both by including traditional, CV-style information, but also via links to articles about my work and even videos of me speaking about this.

The second purpose is to provide a platform for me to share my ideas about aspects of business, technology and change.

I have spent the last 20 years involved in the business of change; be that a small software house growing rapidly to become a large one and floating on the London Stock Exchange in the process, or driving cultural change across the European and Latin American operations of a multinational insurance organisation through the application of award-winning business intelligence.

I am an IT professional, but, having grown up in a company where IT was the business, I regard myself primarily as a business person; albeit one who has specific expertise in technology.

 
If you have problems with viewing any part of this site, then please use the Problems and Browser Compatibility section to report these.